Separated from its protective backshell, NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft autonomously speeds over the sand dunes of Titan. It scans the terrain below, searching for a safe place to land. When Dragonfly discovers a safe site, it turns, descends, and lands at the selected location, touching down for the first time on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon.
A successful first flight – except, this wasn’t happening on Titan itself, but on a computer testbed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, where the Dragonfly rotorcraft is undergoing integration and testing. It was the most comprehensive test to date of Dragonfly’s “first flight” in real time on flight-like avionics, incorporating most of the systems and maneuvers the rotorcraft will employ when it arrives at Titan in 2034.
Dragonfly is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to Saturn’s moon Titan, where it will spend three years flying from location to location to explore a range of sites to study the chemistry, geology, and atmosphere of the Earthlike moon and ultimately advance our understanding of life’s chemical origins.
“The cool thing about first flight is that it’s our most challenging flight,” said Zach Putnam, Dragonfly mobility subsystem lead engineer at APL. “It uses every piece of flight sensor hardware on the lander.”
The recent test brought together flight software and avionics with simulated data input from the sensors Dragonfly will use at Titan, including its newly installed navigation cameras, inertial measurement units, and lidar system.
