2024-04-18 08:43:34
Go Dragonfly ! This is one of the most exciting and ambitious missions to come; it has just obtained the green light for takeoff in 2028. The NASA mission will literally fly in the sky of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
NASA’s DragonflyDragonfly mission is therefore changing phase. There National aeronautics and space administrationNational aeronautics and space administration has validated the finalization of the design of its final design, the teams will then move on to the constructionconstruction of the extraterrestrial helicopter. Numerous environmental tests of the vehicle and scientific instruments will follow.
The legacy of Martian flights
Pure coincidence, this decision was made on the same day that the agency announced that it was at an impasse for the Martian sample return program (MSRMSR), which had become too expensive. It was also at the same time that the teams of the Ingenuity Martian helicopter hung up. The small drone will no longer be able to fly but continues to take images of the ground where it is located.
Dragonfly becomes the next alien aerial mission. The 450 kilo helicopter has just passed its preliminary design review. Its takeoff is scheduled for 2028. It will land on TitanTitan 6 years later, in 2034.
In search of Titan’s habitability
Dragonfly will fly from one site with high scientific potential to another. In less than an hour, the helicopter will be able to travel several dozen kilometers, unprecedented mobility to better learn from Titan, where NASA and ESA had already sent the small Huygens probe almost 20 years ago, in 2005, with the Cassini mission.
With Dragonfly, researchers hope to learn more regarding the chemistry of the atmosphere of Titan, the only moon in the Solar System to have it. Scientists have high hopes for the characterization on site of the atmosphere as being likely to harbor mechanisms for the appearance of life as on Earth.
In pictures: wind tunnel test of NASA’s Dragonfly drone which will fly in Titan’s atmosphere!
Article by Daniel ChrétienDaniel Chrétien, published on 10/29/2023
NASA’s Dragonfly mission aims to send a drone to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. But before we get this fantastic machine off the ground, we first need to make sure it will work well there. The teams therefore carried out wind tunnel tests.
This is an extremely ambitious mission for NASA. The objective of Dragonfly (“libellulelibellule” in French) is to analyze the soil and atmosphere of Titan, which are of very interesting chemical richness. Dragonfly will have to study sites known to contain organic matter and which have had liquid water in the past, areas where elementary life forms might develop. After the European Huygens lander of NASA’s Cassini mission in January 2005, Dragonfly will be the next probe to land on Titan.
Testing Titan’s atmospheric conditions
Close in size to that of our Planet, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, also has an atmosphere, which is unique for a moon in our Solar System. This atmosphere is rich in hydrogenhydrogen. To move from one site to another, the Dragonfly drone, the size of a small car, will fly using its four double rotors.
Wind tunnel test of a scale model of Dragonfly. © Johns Hopkins APL
The Johns Hopkins Institute’s Applied Physics Laboratory launched wind tunnel tests to simulate Titan’s atmospheric environment and see how the probe would adapt to it. Four test campaigns took place, the last in June with a model of the drone half the size of the flight model. These tests were used to verify the different fluid dynamics models developed by the team.
The team tested different flight situations in which the drone might find itself during its mission, with more or less fast winds and different inclinations. The data is used to verify and improve the performance of Dragonfly’s rotors. The probe is supposed to take off in 2027.
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