NASA's Dragonfly Flies Its Hardest Titan Manoeuvre, Autonomously, in Its Most Thorough Simulation Yet

The mission's first flight is its hardest, said Zach Putnam, the mobility subsystem lead engineer at APL: "The cool thing about first flight is that it's our most challenging flight." He added that Titan operations have to be autonomous because the craft will fly without real-time help from Earth.

Where will Dragonfly land on Titan?

The Planetary Society's description of the first flight says the eight-rotor craft separates after entry and flies itself to its first landing site in Titan's Shangri-La dune fields.

What comes next for the mission?

The hardware is coming together too: technician Emory Toomey installed one of Dragonfly's two navigation cameras at APL on 19 August, NASA says. The team built the software testing up in steps, from a single rotor spin to a short reposition flight and then a partial scouting flight, adding sensors at each stage. NASA says the next runs will use the actual flight system with the rotorcraft's own avionics, try other flight profiles, and deliberately inject faults to check how the autonomous software responds.

The same post reports a separate test of the pose mechanism, which lowers the rotorcraft out of its stowed position inside the backshell so it can start its rotors before it separates. Lockheed Martin engineers ran static tests with representative mass and deployment tests with the hardware tilted to different angles.

Dragonfly's job on Titan is to study chemistry that may bear on the origins of life, which is why a clean first flight matters so much. Launch is no earlier than 2028, followed by a six-year voyage, with arrival at Titan in 2034 and three years of flying between sites to study the moon's chemistry, geology and atmosphere. The fault-injection tests are the ones to watch, since they show what the craft does when something goes wrong with nobody in range to help.