Conquering Titan With a Nuclear Quad Octocopter

10 Jan 2018 POSTED BY Aarthi E M

In December, NASA announced two finalist concepts for a robotic mission that will launch in the mid-2020s. The first is the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR), which would send a fairly conventional spacecraft over to a comet to grab a chunk of its nucleus and bring it back to Earth. That's cool and all, but we're much more excited about the second finalist concept: Dragonfly, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL), a quad octocopter that would explore Saturn's moon Titan from the air. The idea is that it would work like a planetary rover, except that it would fly instead of drive, allowing it to cover much more ground at the risk of, you know, crashing.

We've seen lots of drones that can do amazing things, and also lots of drones that crash very, very badly while trying to do amazing things. Sending a fully autonomous flying robot to an alien world over a billion kilometers away and expecting it to fly around for a couple years without any human intervention seems extraordinarily ambitious, so we checked in with APL to see exactly what they're working on.

What's so interesting about Titan is that it's got a methane cycle much like Earth's water cycle, with liquid methane forming lakes and rivers and clouds and rain. There's also a bunch of organic compounds thrown into the mix, which makes it an intriguing place to look for very primitive, and very weird, life.

The Cassini mission to Saturn included a little probe called Huygens, which was dropped on Titan in January of 2005. Huygens was mostly designed to measure atmospheric conditions, but it managed to survive landing on the surface of Titan for a little over an hour anyway, and sent back a picture of the surface.

Source: IEEE Spectrum