NASA has set a provisional launch date of July 2028 for its Dragonfly mission, meant to explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan, with budgetary uncertainty cited as the explanation for the project’s one-year delay.
The Dragonfly team can now move forward with the subsequent stage of development — Phase C — for the car-sized, nuclear-powered rotorcraft drone that can fly above and land on the sands of Titan, a world planetary scientists imagine is wealthy in organic molecules.
“The Dragonfly team has successfully overcome numerous technical and programmatic challenges on this daring endeavor to collect recent science on Titan,” NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator Nicola Fox said in a press release. “I’m pleased with this team and their ability to maintain all features of the mission moving.”
At NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) meeting on Nov. 28, the director of the agency’s planetary science division, Lori Glaze, revealed the explanation for the launch delay — originally set to move to Titan in 2027. She said that formal confirmation of Dragonfly and the official costing and scheduling of the mission by NASA’s Agency Program Management Council (APMC) had been postponed because of uncertainty about how much money could be available for the project.
“Due to these incredibly large uncertainties in Financial Yr 2024 and Financial Yr 2025 funding and budgets, the choice was made on the APMC to postpone the official confirmation,” Glaze said on the meeting.
She added that Dragonfly could be taken back to the APMC in spring 2024 after NASA’s Financial Yr 2025 budget proposal.
The team will replan the mission upon request, and when any obligatory restructuring has been accomplished and reviewed, NASA will officially assess the mission’s launch readiness date in mid-2024. This implies some elements of Dragonfly’s final mission design and fabrication will likely be delayed while others proceed.
Up to now, Dragonfly is the one NASA mission scheduled to go to the surface of an ocean moon. Once at Titan, the drone will seek for conditions that might imply habitability. Dragonfly may also investigate how far any possible prebiotic chemistry has progressed on the moon of Saturn and even hunt for signs of water or hydrocarbon-based life that exist already there.
Along with traveling further across an alien world than every other planetary rover has, the 4 dual-bladed rotorcraft may also land on Saturn’s surface in numerous regions, collecting samples to find out the composition of surface materials under various geological conditions.
The investigation of Titan is of high priority for planetary scientists because, along with being an ocean world, it’s the only solar system moon known to own a thick atmosphere and an Earth-like hydrological cycle of methane clouds, rain and liquid flowing across its surface and filling lakes and seas. This, and the potential presence of abundant complex organic materials frozen into the moon‘s icy surface, boosts the potential for habitability on Titan.
Dragonfly, which will likely be built and operated by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, is constructed to conduct this investigation using its equipped cameras, sensors and samplers.
“Dragonfly is such a daring endeavor, like nothing that has ever been done before,” Dragonfly principal investigator Elizabeth Turtle said. “I’m inspired by the way in which our team has repeatedly overcome challenges by working together and considering outside the box.”
Several Dragonfly components, including its control and navigation systems, have already been tested over the deserts of California — chosen for its resemblance to the sand dunes of Titan — in addition to in wind tunnels at NASA’s Langley Research Center. A full-scale model has also been tested in Johns Hopkins APL’s massive Titan Chamber — which simulates the frigid temperatures and atmospheric pressures of Titan’s methane-rich environment.
“We have demonstrated that we’re ready for the subsequent steps on the trail to Titan, and we’ll keep moving forward with the identical curiosity and creativity which have brought Dragonfly up to now,” Turtle concluded.