The Dragonfly helicopter headed for Saturn's moon Titan has very little in common with the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. Ingenuity was small, light, and lightly powered - which makes sense when you consider the environment it had to work in. One source I've seen said flying on Mars is equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet here on Earth. 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 a denser atmosphere seems to make the task of flying on Titan easier.
Ingenuity has two propellers and is powered by batteries on board, charged by photovoltaic panels. Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered, car-sized, eight propeller drone. That's right, instead of batteries, this helicopter ship is powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators, RTGs, like the Voyager probes.
An illustration of NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft soaring in the skies of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)
The milestone? Dragonfly passed its Critical Design Review, NASA announced on Thursday (April 24).
"Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly's mission design, fabrication, integration and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself," a NASA statement reads.
Because of the necessity to launch at times essentially chosen by the planetary alignments - like flying to all the planets - Dragonfly is currently penciled in July 2028 to fly to Saturn on a Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center. As far out as Saturn is, its orbital period (one Saturnian year) is 29.5 Earth years, I'd guess if they can't make it by 2028, the next date will be around two weeks later if they delay until 2029. The trip to Saturn will take almost seven years. The mission's goal is to spend more than three years studying areas across Titan's frigid and diverse surface. Considering how these deep space missions historically have lasted many times longer than the plan, we can hope Dragonfly does the same.
EDIT 0824 AM EDT on 4/29: Thanks to commenter Malatrope for pointing out that I missed a big mistake in the first paragraph, saying it was easier to fly on Mars when I should have said Titan! My proofreading team will be whipped at the earliest opportunity.
Sending a helicopter to a moon orbiting Saturn, so it can look around for a few years.
ReplyDeleteI'll be honest with you, it's pretty exciting to be able to say that
Absolutely. The similar thing is that I remember watching the Voyagers launch but I thought of that as a "four year mission" not that I'd be patiently waiting to see if they last 50 years, out in interstellar space.
DeleteSomewhere on the Internet there is a group of people who have a subreddit fantasizing about getting friendly with Dragonfly.
ReplyDeleteOf all the planets/moons in the solar system Titan may very well be the one BEST suited for rotary aircraft usage...
ReplyDeleteDragonfly is a human size 8 ft tall, 12 feet long quadcopter (with dual 4 foot rotor blades). The joy of the internet is someone will build and fly on a mock up of Dragonfly.
ReplyDeleteThe Dragonfly team has built and flown a model in deserts "that simulate the terrain on Titan." But that one doesn't look like Dragonfly - it looks more like something you'd buy at Harbor Freight. It's a cube with the four sets of propellers on the corners without the streamlined body.
DeleteThe way Space.com works, if you go that link below the picture, (" Dragonfly passed its Critical Design Review") a 1 minute video starts playing showing the mock-up flying around.
No joy, there is no blue link. I clicked on every blue link on the page. Might be my adblock. I searched Youtube a bit and there are some clips. Saw the Harbor Freight version with blue feet, maybe 5 seconds long. OK, that was very old but practical, at the time it was made it gave people a basic visual on the concept. Saw Johns Hopkins flying the half sized version in the wind tunnel except there was no wind. Saw NASA pretending they will design and control it through augmented reality. Lots of computer rendered video. Probably saw every female employee NASA has. The deeper I look, the less confidence I have in the mission.
DeleteThey really got this years long term dormant to active tech in vacuum/sub-critical temps down pretty well. Strikes me as specific kind of highly robust architecture engineering and build durability area. The plutonium generators must be getting serious generational up-grades, that has to be a particularly miniaturized for the hopper to have decent flight characteristics. Get a lot more flight time on the daily scale, makes it s no brainer.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I find remarkable is the whole radio/coms suite, to talk with everything over those distances, with what can be assumed to be pretty low wattage, and how they maintain their coms that far from earth, and with what all electromagnetic environment from everything that far out. You got the crazy powerful magnetic fields of a gas giant, just distance alone, the solar ion weather, then there is what frequencies are best suited, and do you use squirt comm's in what digital formate to preserve the data packages at those relatively tiny wattages. I mean their antenna tech alone has got to be pretty darn cool, never the packaging due to mass restrictions and payload bay restrictions. Some seriously ingenious thinking involved here. And make the whole of it so durable over time/temps is a totally separate thing i'd say. Been wondering too are they employing critical super conductor tech...
Anyone using superconductor materials in antennas?
DeleteAnon 1154 first - I haven't heard of any use of superconductors in antennas. Resistance isn't the important property so much as impedance. The impedances are generally huge compared to the resistances so there literally isn't anything that superconductors could buy.
DeleteAnon 0804 - The frequencies for the probes were long ago decided on, which is pretty much the only way to do things. They depend on the Deep Space Network, with those enormous dish antennas they use. Some description and a neat picture <a hef = "https://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2024/11/voyager-1-switches-to-backup.html>here</a>. The physics of this stuff is well-known and generally the ways to get a better signal to noise ratio is to optimize the transmit power and receiver gain. Since more transmit power is horrifically expensive on the spacecraft side, they build enormous antennas for the ground to maximize the receiver gain. Better to build a few really big antennas for the ground side rather than making Every Single Satellite much more expensive.
I'm of the opinion that they will use burst mode, since Jupiter can occlude the signal path from time to time. Unless there's a repeater somewhere in the neighborhood...
Delete(Think Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or somesuch.)
Interesting. Lots of complications come to mind. My first thought is find the angular diameter of Jupiter as seen from Earth, and compare that to the angular diameter of the Deep Space Network dish antennas. Can the signal be blocked? To be blocked, the angular diameter of the DSN beam has to be smaller than that of Jupiter. Does it even matter - I mean Saturn's orbital period is 29.5 yeas, Jupiter's is 11.9 - so at most Jupiter could be between us twice in one Saturnian year.
DeleteLots of complications in there.
Unless I'm blind, I think you meant Titan rather than Mars in the last sentence of your first paragraph.
ReplyDeleteOMG yes!
DeleteAhahahaha. Nuke powered aircraft, just like all the nuke age sci-fi writers wrote about. Now do nuclear-heated plasma or hydrogen as a space ship engine.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to hear about all the leftist crazies trying to shut down the launch because nuke and Elon-SpaceX.
I wonder if you could use the same flyer design on Saturn proper? As I recall room temperature and water clouds is at about 10 bar.
ReplyDeleteI guess the better question is if they know of things that flying in the atmosphere could tell them that orbiting the planet hasn't. Cassini was in orbit around Saturn for 13 years, so tons of measurements.
DeleteHard to say. I think the smallest cloudtop feature resolved from Cassini was in the km range, so there is a lot not seen. It could be as boring as flying over the mid Pacific Ocean, or absolutely unexpected and amazing.
ReplyDelete