›NASA's Dragonfly Mission seminar

NASA's Dragonfly Mission with Prof. Ralph Lorenz (free registration)

Saturn's giant moon Titan has been revealed to be remarkably Earth-like, with a landscape of vast dunefields, river channels and lakes under a smoggy sky punctuated by methane downpours. Titan serves as a frigid laboratory in which the same processes that shape our own planet can be seen in action under exotic conditions. Titan has a rich inventory of complex organic molecules that may provide clues how the building blocks of life are assembled. NASA recently selected APL's Dragonfly mission concept as the next $1B-class New Frontiers mission to launch in 2026, to arrive in 2034. Dragonfly is an octocopter lander, able to repeatedly take off and fly tens of kilometers in Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity to sample the surface in a wide range of geological settings. This presentation will describe the mission and how the concept was developed.


About Prof. Ralph Lorenz

Ralph Lorenz worked as an engineer for the European Space Agency on the design of the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan, and as a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, and since 2006, at the JHU Applied Physics Lab. His activities have centered on Titan, Cassini-Huygens and future missions there, but his interests include Mars, dust devils, sand dunes, planetary atmospheres and landscapes, and aerospace systems. He is associated with NASA's InSight mission at Mars and the Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki, and is the Mission Architect for Dragonfly, NASA's next New Frontiers mission (a rotorcraft lander for Titan). He is author or co-author of nine books including 'Lifting Titan's Veil','Spinning Flight', 'Exploring Planetary Climate' and 'Space Systems Failures', as well as over 300 journal publications.