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NASA begins building nuclear-powered Dragonfly drone for 2028 launch to
Saturn moon Titan
News
By Elizabeth Howell published yesterday
"This milestone essentially marks the birth of our flight system."

illustration of a silvery metallic rotorcraft flying over orangish dunes
An illustration of NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft soaring in the skies of SaturnrCOs largest moon, Titan. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins
APL/Steve Gribben)

NASA is one step closer to sending a drone mission to another world.

Technicians at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in
Maryland have begun building and testing the nuclear-powered Dragonfly rotorcraft, which will launch toward the huge Saturn moon Titan in 2028.

"This milestone essentially marks the birth of our flight system,"
Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator at APL, said in a
NASA statement on Tuesday (March 10).

Article continues below
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four people in white protective clothing work on a complex piece of
electrical equipment inside a white-walled scientific lab

From left, Carlisa Drew, Seth Harvey, Anthony Fanelli, Emory Toomey and
TJ Lee conduct power and functional testing on DragonflyrCOs Integrated Electronics Module (IEM) and Power Switching Unit (PSU) in the cleanroom
at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel,
Maryland. The IEM is DragonflyrCOs rCLbrain,rCY containing the spacecraftrCOs core avionics; the PSUs control the flow of power to DragonflyrCOs
instruments and systems. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman) "Building a first-of-its kind vehicle to fly across another ocean world
in our solar system pushes us to the edge of what's possible, but that's exactly why this stage is so exciting," Turtle added. "The team is doing
an outstanding job, and every component we install and every test we run brings us one step closer to launching Dragonfly to Titan."

The car-sized Dragonfly will be the second rotorcraft to explore the
skies of a world beyond Earth. The first was NASA's Mars helicopter
Ingenuity, whose fuselage was only the size of a tissue box. The
solar-powered Ingenuity was designed for just a handful of hops but
survived an ambitious flight campaign that lasted nearly three years,
from April 2021 to January 2024.

Building on what NASA learned, Dragonfly will be bigger rCo and powered by nuclear energy, not the sun. The Titan drone is also a full mission,
costing about $3.35 billion; Ingenuity was a technology demonstrator
with a price tag of just $85 million.

Dragonfly is expected to launch in 2028 toward Titan, the largest moon
of Saturn and second-largest satellite in the solar system, behind
Jupiter's Ganymede. Titan is thought to be rich in the precursor
molecules of life as we know it, which makes it an exciting target for scientists, but it has been studied up close just once rCo by the European Huygens lander, which survived for a few hours in Titan's skies and on
its surface on Jan. 14, 2005.

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After touching down on Titan, Dragonfly aims to "explore a range of
diverse sites to study the chemistry, geology and atmosphere of the terrestrial moon and ultimately advance our understanding of life's
chemical origins," NASA officials stated. But first, the mission needs
to be readied for space.

At APL, the first weeks of testing will focus on the spacecraft's
integrated electronics module rCo a sort of "brain" for the mission that focuses on items like guidance, navigation and data handling rCo and power-switching units.

Testing and integration is expected to continue into early 2027. The spacecraft will next be shipped to Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado for systems testing, before a brief return to APL to assess how Dragonfly will do in the space environment. APL will send Dragonfly to
NASA's Kennedy Space Center no earlier than spring 2028, to launch
aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

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Dragonfly's protective shell for flying through space is also being
tested: the shell finished aerodynamic assessments in wind tunnels at
NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia and is now in the integration
and testing stage at Lockheed Martin. APL is also assessing insulating
foam intended to keep Dragonfly from freezing in Titan's frigid
atmosphere, and other items like the science payload and flight radio
are also coming together.

While several years lie between now and launch, entering the
build-and-test phase is a big milestone.

"We've spent years designing and refining this amazing rotorcraft on
computer screens and in laboratories, and now we get to bring all those elements together and transform Dragonfly into an actual flight system," Annette Dolbow, the Dragonfly integration and test lead at APL, said in
the same statement.

Elizabeth Howell
Elizabeth Howell
Contributing Writer
Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., was a staff writer in the spaceflight channel between 2022 and 2024 specializing in Canadian space news. She
was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years from 2012 to 2024. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House, leading world coverage about a lost-and-found space tomato on the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches
on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, "Why Am I
Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022) is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams.
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