NASA’s Dragonfly mission has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028.
Dragonfly, a car-sized, nuclear-powered rotorcraft being designed and built for NASA at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, will explore Saturn’s moon Titan. Following launch and a six-year journey to Titan, the Dragonfly rotorcraft will spend over three years investigating multiple landing sites across the moon’s diverse surface. Flying a comprehensive science package, Dragonfly seeks to understand Titan habitability and the building blocks of life as we know it.
Hardware is being built and software developed, tests are being completed and analyses verified as the team progresses through its development schedule.
Johns Hopkins APL engineers Max Wolbeck and Daniel Peterson install and adjust the rotors on the full-scale test model representing half of the Dragonfly lander in the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center. During a monthlong testing campaign, the team was able to evaluate rotor system performance in Titan-like conditions.
NASA
Members of the Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer team inspect their device, part of the Dragonfly Mass Spectrmeter (DraMS) instrument package, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
NASA
