NASA's Next Flying Instrument in Space Might Be Very Different

I've written quite a bit about the Ingenuity helicopter now on Mars, including how the success of the little flying drone was impacting future missions.  Thanks to Space.com, I've come across a "next generation" flying drone, called Dragonfly, being worked on for a future mission to Saturn's moon Titan that might be flying in the not too distant future.  It's very different from Ingenuity.

One of the big problems in the design of Ingenuity was that Mars' atmosphere is very thin.  One source I've seen said flying on Mars is equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet here on Earth.  Ingenuity has never flown above 66 feet on Mars. By contrast, Titan, while smaller than Mars, has an atmosphere that's denser than ours, with a surface pressure 50 percent higher.  The combination of having lower surface gravity and denser atmosphere seems to make the task of flying on Mars easier.    

A section from a Space.com infographic on Titan.  Like many infographics, it's too "tall" to reproduce here. 

Dragonfly is going to differ from Ingenuity in an important way.  While the article doesn't describe it in any detail, it refers to the drone being a nuclear-powered, car-sized, eight propeller drone and provides this conceptual rendering of it. 

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Testing is now underway on NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered, car-sized aerial drone that will look for potential precursors to life on Saturn's moon, Titan. But before Dragonfly can take to the sky, NASA has to make sure it can withstand the moon's unique environment.

...

The lander will traverse Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere using four dual-coaxial rotors, but to ensure that these rotors can perform under such conditions, the Dragonfly team has conducted numerous tests at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, including operating the drone's rotors in an wind tunnel that can simulate the atmospheric conditions on Saturn's largest moon.

Dragonfly's main goal is to study the complex chemistry on Titan, the only moon or even planet known to have liquid on its surface.  Not water, but liquid ethane and methane falls like rain, forming lakes.  Equipped with cameras, sensors, and samplers, Dragonfly will investigate areas of Titan known to contain organic materials like those two and possible others.  Special interest is on regions where organic chemicals might have encountered liquid water beneath the moon's icy surface in the past.

Four Dragonfly test campaigns have [been] conducted: Two in a 14-by-22 foot subsonic tunnel, and another two at a 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT). The subsonic tunnel is used to validate fluid dynamic models developed by mission scientists, while the variable-density heavy gas capability of the TDT is used to validate computer models in simulated atmospheric conditions Dragonfly will likely encounter on Titan.

The most recent testing, held in June, involved a half-scale Dragonfly model with hundreds of test runs, said Bernadine Juliano, APL's test lead for the project. 

"We tested conditions across the expected flight envelope at a variety of wind speeds, rotor speeds, and flight angles to assess the aerodynamic performance of the vehicle," Juliano said. "We completed more than 700 total runs, encompassing over 4,000 individual data points. All test objectives were successfully accomplished and the data will help increase confidence in our simulation models on Earth before extrapolating to Titan conditions."

Sounds like encouraging news. There was no mention of a mission name or date, and the few searches I tried didn't turn up anything. Since there's a long lead time for deep space missions like this, I'll SWAG that it will be in the 2030s.