NASA-Built Autonomous Drone Set to Rove Titan
A mission to send a nuclear-powered, autonomously-operating drone to one of Saturn’s moons will commence in 2026—and the craft, nicknamed Dragonfly, will arrive in Titan’s atmosphere in 2034. Then, the sedan-sized probe will investigate the lower-gravity surface’s dunes, mountains, rivers, and lakes—and report back instantly (though a transmission takes almost two hours from Titan to Earth). Another one of Dragonfly’s tasks will be to create a map of the moon’s surface. “We don’t actually have a map. There’s no GPS; there’s no magnetic field even to orient yourself,” Doug Adams, a spacecraft systems engineer, tells NPR. To get around, “the drone will navigate by continuously photographing the landscape, creating its own ‘map’ as it goes.” Read more there.
Via npr.org link opens in a new window
