NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission To Explore Titan (sciencealert.com) 85
NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Dragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements, studying the world's mysterious atmosphere and topography while searching for hints of life (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) on the only world other than Earth in our solar system with standing liquid on its surface. The New York Times reports: The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2026. Once at Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights. Cameras on Dragonfly will stream images during flight, offering people on Earth a bird's-eye view of the Saturn moon. In addition to a camera, Dragonfly will carry an assortment of scientific instruments: spectrometers to study Titan's composition; a suite of meteorology sensors; and even a seismometer to detect titanquakes when it lands on the ground. Drills in the landing skids will collect samples of the Titan surface for onboard analysis.
Socialism... (Score:2)
Like TVA?
Like the CCC, that built a lot of the National Parks?
Like your insurance company?
I think You do not understand the meaning of the word.
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.. all that effort and it looks just like Arizona. I was promised really weird looking alien landscapes by the sci-fi writers.
Just put a green tint over it.
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Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's unfortunate that they're starting so far away. Then again, Titan appears to go through long seasonal cycles, and Huygen's landing point has clearly been sculpted through fluvial action, so you never know.
This is the reason I'd been hoping for the rotary-wing designs called for in some Titan probe concepts, as they can travel much further per charge (but are more expensive to develop). That said, I'm still completely thrilled by this choice; this is one of my dream missions. It had become increasingly clear that this was the obvious path to take - a RTG powering unlimited sustained flight would have been unrealistically heavy and expensive, and you want to do surface science regardless, so it only makes sense to fly for a burst during the Titan day, land, recharge, do surface science, transmit your data (including images from the previous day's flight so that the next day's flight can be planned), receive instructions for the next day's flight, and repeat.
I tried to go to Dragonfly's website to learn more about the scientific payload, but it appears to be down now. Titan's complex organic chemistry is what fascinates me the most; we've found such an amazing diversity so far. How complex does it get? We don't know, but I can't wait to find out!
While the journey north to Selk is in the initial mission, there's no reason - barring hardware failure - that the mission needs to end at that point; the RTG and batteries will remain functional for far longer than the initial mission plan. And they plan to make increasingly ambitious long-distance hops as time goes on, so they'll cover more ground with time. I've not seen specifics on the craft's capabilities, but it looks like perhaps ~2km per Earth day on average (in couple-hour bursts of dozens of kilometers)? If so then they could be getting up to lake-latitudes (~3500km away?) in as little as 4-5 Earth years (more in practice due to investigations en route). The craft should surely be able to remain operational long enough.
Re: Unfortunately... (Score:1)
Let me guess... (Score:2)
They're going to have to launch it on a Falcon Heavy. :)
They should just give NASA's budget to Elon, and actually get something done.
More RC cars, for Billions of dollars.
But at least a million NASA engineers' kids can go to college, for one mission's worth of funding.
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better a working RC car than a non-functional tesla in orbit around the sun.
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better a working RC car than a non-functional tesla in orbit around the sun.
Yeah, but that fucking picture ...
The pic was worth it, alone. (Score:2)
And it's in orbit forever; or until I can Jack a spacecraft and steal it.
Grog6; Space Pirate!
(I like the way that sounds...)
I'll do the Heavy Metal type landing, and do Donuts until the batteries give out.
Maybe do "I (heart) T.S." in 20 mile high letters on Utopia Planetia...
Now if I can just get Natalie Portman to bring the hot grits, I'll be all set. :)
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Is it song time? Yeay! My turn!
(picks up guitar) "Her skin is pale, her eyes are red,
Her leaden voice commands the dead,
To rise and stand beside their dreadful queen
No mortal power escapes her thrall
Her hunger will consume us all
And even now I hear her call: Jolene...."
This one's for the Xians! (song time) (Score:1)
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
[Verse 1]
Virgins sold in quantity
African-American heredity
I'm playing my guitar and I'm feeling fine
Why are all the ni**ers in the unemployment line?
[Chorus]
White trash, get down on your knees
Time for cake and sodomy
White trash, get down on your knees
Time for cake and sodomy
[Verse 2]
Teenage girl, a teenage queen
Until she's on video, a porno queen
She likes to give head, she likes it mean
That's why she's my little queen
[Chorus]
White trash, get down on your knees
Time f
I see how they got rid of the GNAA! (Score:2)
see the two *'s in the above lyric for a clue. :)
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The hate on Slashdot is strong these days - it's like so many of the ACs today have no courage, integrity, or even any self-confidence. What failures. Perhaps I should go back to browsing at +1 to wipe the ACs out.
That's only the current ones. (Score:2)
NASA has been going over 50 years, that's multiple generations, much like the rest of the military industrial complex.
That's a lot of idiots to put thru school.
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12 years for one drone sounds like bad odds. Send more!
Actually, it sounds like an awesome commercial opportunity. We already have rich folks willing to spend millions of dollars to fly almost into space.
Imagine what they would spend to fly a drone on Mars . . . ?
NASA would no longer be a slave from funding in Congress. Unfortunately Congress Critters in space concentrates on getting pork for their states.
Now, what really interests me is:
Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights.
I want one of these in my Vespa scooter!
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While you can't buy Plutonium 238 pellets to make a battery that rivals the thermoelectric generators [wikipedia.org] that NASA makes, you can make your own nuclear battery [hackaday.com]. You'd need about 8 million of those to replace your average Vespa battery, however, and it would be a little impractical due to the size, weight and cost.
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The lag to Mars is bad enough that real time control isn't happening.
Land on All the Things (Score:5, Interesting)
I was just wondering the other day why NASA doesn't send landers/rovers to all the moons and landable planets in our solar system. There are already satellites around most of them, but there are surprisingly few things we've put landers on before. Yeah we can land stuff on Mars, great, now try somewhere we know almost nothing about. Io, Enceladus, Europa, Titan, Ganymede, maybe a zeppelin on Venus. Europa Clipper is coming but dragging its heels and should've happened decades ago.
I'm also wondering why it's gonna take 8 years to arrive to Titan, is it on a slow boat to Saturn?
Slow boat? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm also wondering why it's gonna take 8 years to arrive to Titan, is it on a slow boat to Saturn?
Most likely: yes. In general, faster transit means burn more fuel. So you'd have a heavier launch vehicle. Or a smaller payload. So basically it's a trade-off. A longer wait, against lower mission costs, more (or more sophisticated) instruments carried along. Or perhaps even a longer mission duration once you get there.
Seems like a worthwhile trade-off to make in terms of costs vs. scientific results. Besides 8 years trip time doesn't seem excessive for this type of deep space mission.
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It took less than 7 years for Huygens to arrive to Titan, and it did multiple gravity assists first. And was launched on a rocket with lift capability comparable to a Falcon 9. If they used a Falcon Heavy, or something else that should be available by 2034, then they could send a Curiosity-sized rover and/or arrive faster. Although, sending a quadcopter has some mobility advantages.
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Launch windows and complex orbital mechanics come into play as well. Saturn has an orbit of 29 years and Huygens was launched in 1997, so it looks like they are taking a similar route, maybe with one extra solar or planetary flyby to deal with the added mass.
Simply shooting it out faster on a heavier rocket might very well miss the proper alignments for the necessary flybys, leading to a longer overall journey.
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Taking off at a higher velocity would not necessarily help. Remember you have to also slow down at the other end if you're going to enter orbit or land somewhere! So you'd have to add a bigger rocket engine and more fuel to the payload and possibly cancel a lot of the gains. The aim of designing one of these missions is for the spacecraft to arrive at Saturn moving in the same direction at roughly the same speed as the planet itself, so entering orbit is reasonably simple. The best way to do that is a sling
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Taking the slow boat saves money, less energy is needed to get there.
Landings on those objects is challenging. They have little gravity of their own and are subject to tidal forces from their neighbours - for example Io's extreme volcanic activity is due to that. So navigating and landing there is harder. Additionally because of their orbits and occlusion by the planets they orbit it makes the day/night and comms/no comms cycles harder to deal with too.
So it's all possible, but given how relatively difficul
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Additionally because of their orbits and occlusion by the planets they orbit it makes the day/night and comms/no comms cycles harder to deal with too.
With the communication delay from any other planet, wouldn't the landing need to be 100% automated? I'm sure we'll want to maintain tracking as much as possible, but the control is going to have to be local to the lander.
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Sure, I was thinking more about the day-to-day operation and remote diagnosis of problems. Even the much longer round trip is a pain for that. Also the data rate will be lower, and there aren't satellites in orbit to relay the data yet so one of those will be needed too.
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Basically, we've focused on Mars because it may have had life in the past. Our perception of the moons of Jupiter/Saturn have changed enough over time to now seriously consider that perhaps life really could exist. So, it takes quite a while to go from that to ac
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I'm sure that NASA would love to launch more missions, but their budget is comparatively tiny, and they are required to spend it in a very inefficient way by congress's never-ending search for pork. We spend less than half a percent of our federal budget on NASA today. In total we've spend 1.3 Trillon USD in todays' money on NASA. Out of that we got huge scientific and technical improvements, an moon landings. Conversely, we've spent an estimated 1.5 trillion dollars on the F-35 programme.
Even if they had t
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I think, if you work it out in a Saturn-centric frame of reference, Jupiter will be about half an orbit away from the (relative) positioning of the planets when Cassini-Huygens was doing it's gravity assists. So, the speedboat used previously won't indeed be available.
slow boat , no : slingshot (Score:3)
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expansive in propellant
You are right, propellant is quite expansive.
Re:Land on All the Things (Score:5, Interesting)
While you can certainly mass-produce landers designed for specific types of bodies, there's very different needs for each body, and sometimes even different regions of the same body.
* Io is in a fierce radiation environment, solar power is rather weak, and there's lots of potential erupted contaminants in its exosphere to worry about. We've not made a close-up surface map to determine suitable landing sites, either.
* Europa is a high radiation environment, solar power is fairly weak, and we'd like better surface maps. Plus, the main interest is under the ice, but trying to design a mission to get under the ice when you've not even seen what the surface is like from a lander would be extremely difficult. Even Europa Clipper is just setting the groundwork for a basic lander.
* Titan has a dense atmosphere, very weak solar power, very low temperatures, very specific materials compatibility requirements, and pretty significant gravity
* Ganymede has no atmosphere, is in a fairly high radiation environment and has significant gravity. Better surface maps would be of use.
* The closest we've launched to a zeppelin on Venus was the Vega balloons, but they were only designed for short-term operation. Some proposals have been designed for balloons lofted by ISRU O2+N2, which could operate for years. More commonly, there's proposals without ISRU, designed to operate for weeks or months by replacing lost gas with that supplied by Earth. Either way, there's significant engineering involved; it's a very nontrivial task. There's still debate even over really basic things, like whether there's precipitation or frosts in Venus's atmosphere, or where its lightning is and what causes it.
All very different craft requirements.
That said, I do think you're headed in the right direction in some regards:
* Mass-produced probes for "similar" bodies - for example, for asteroids and small moons within a given size range, and the like. E.g. launching dozens of flat-packed probes all at once like was done with the Starlink satellites, and repeating every so often... there's surely a good argument for that.
* Now that launch costs have fallen so much, there's no need to guarantee such high levels of probe reliability, nor to go to such extremes on mass savings - both of which are exceedingly expensive. It even makes solar-powered outer planets missions much more realistic rather than having to pay for RTGs (whose production rate is limited regardless). Make your probes on the cheap, launch them, and if they fail, make another version on the cheap with the previous problem fixed; the wasted rocket launch is no longer going to break the bank.
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If you're only interested in a fly-by then you can blast off with the biggest booster you can buy and zip past Saturn in just a few years (New Horizons was the fastest probe yet, and would have only taken about 2 years to Saturn), but a mission where you want to get there at minimal approach velocity in order to get into orbit is always going to take a while. It varies a bit depending on where the inner planets are (for gravity assist maneuvers), but the principle is less fuel = more science and that means
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Well I hope Iran doesn't shoot it down (Score:1)
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Free Speech is the right to shout Death To America, not to be free of consequences for shouting Death To America.
We don't bomb them because they shout Death To America. We bomb them because they're convenient and we need distractions. That's why every president has bombed Iran for ages now.
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The solar system's best drone candidate (Score:5, Informative)
Because Titan is smaller than Mars but has a denser atmosphere than Earth, this should be an excellent place to fly one. It has been estimated that a human could fly on Titan by flapping wings attached to his arms:
https://kinja.com/api/profile/... [kinja.com]
Contrast this with Mars, where the atmosphere is so thin that the proposed helicopter will have to have airfoils that rotate extremely fast to maintain lift.
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At last! (Score:2)
Sending nuclear waste to a new celestial body (Score:2)
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History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
that's some serious physics & engineering, man (Score:2)
Helos are pretty twitchy things to start with, to figure out flight, power, and control parameters for a planet (moon) we no very little about, with different gravity, different atmosphere & density.
Honestly, if they pull this off successfully I will be (once again) stand amazed at the capabilities of the US space program. Overadministrated, risk-phobic, hidebound, bureaucratic and all those things they may be...but goddamn they're still rocket scientists.
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Should be less twitchy on Titan, due to lower gravity and a denser atmosphere. But certainly nontrivial. Plus, no GPS or magnetic field for navigation. Also, the temperature is only about 10 degrees warmer than the boiling point of oxygen, so everything will be brittle, and it may rain or be damp with organic solvents...
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Fantastic points. So...technically, they could literally build it in-situ out of ice (setting aside the technical difficulty of keeping water liquid all that way probably being even more prohibitive than the helo in the first place).
One wonders about the idea of a circuit board made of distilled water ice for work in such environments. Hm.
I hope it has a methane fuel cell (Score:2)
Since it rains methane there, that would be a good idea.
PS. Obviously, it's a non-smoker planet.
Measure force pressure (Score:1)
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Flight of the Dragonfly? (Score:2)
I wonder if they will name the flight computer Arielle . At least Titan will not bloop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]