Dragonfly: The Dune Drone

More than a decade before the real Dragonfly soars over the organic dunes of Titan, the team developing the NASA rotorcraft lander at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is refining the concept by sending instrumented models over the sands of Earth’s deserts. A team of APL engineers ventured back to Imperial Dunes, California, in May 2022 to send the Dragonfly “testbed” through the skies to collect data they’ll need to develop guidance, control and navigation algorithms for the actual Dragonfly, set for launch toward Saturn’s largest moon in 2027.   The Dragonfly team has built two identical, half-scale “Integrated Technology Platform” drones (called ITPs) with hardware and software similar to what will fly on the real thing – including eight independent rotor assemblies, a flight computer and digital image processor, a navigation camera, an inertial measurement unit with comparable gyroscopes and accelerometers, and initial versions of the image processing and flight control algorithms. The flights shown here were undertaken autonomously by the ITP. The ITPs have logged over 100 flights at multiple test sites and under varying conditions as their configurations have matured in complexity.