NASA's Dragonfly mission will hop across Saturn's moon Titan, taking samples and photos.
Johns Hopkins APL
On the face of it, NASA's newest probe sounds incredible. Known as Dragonfly, it is a dual-rotor quadcopter (technically an octocopter, even more technically an X8 octocopter); it's roughly the size of a compact car; it's completely autonomous; it's nuclear powered; and it will hover above the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.
But Elizabeth Turtle, the mission's principle investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, insists that this is actually a pretty tame space probe, as these things go.
"There's not a lot of new technology," she says.
Quadcopters (even X8 octocopters) are for sale on Amazon these days. Self-driving technology is coming along quickly. Nuclear power is harder to come by, but the team plans to use the same kind of system that runs NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Everything that's going into Dragonfly is already being used somewhere else.
Which is not to say that the idea of a nuclear-powered drone flying around a moon of Saturn doesn't sound kind of crazy.
"Almost everyone who gets exposed to Dragonfly has a similar thought process. The first time you see it, you think: 'You gotta be kidding, that's crazy,' " says Doug Adams, the mission's spacecraft systems engineer. But, he says, "eventually, you come to realize that this is a highly executable mission."
NASA reached that conclusion when, after a lot of careful study, it gave Dragonfly the green light earlier this summer. "This revolutionary mission would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said when the roughly $1 billion project was selected in June. "A great nation does great things."
For Shannon MacKenzie, a postdoc on the mission, there's no destination that could be greater than Titan. The largest moon of Saturn, it has dunes, mountains, gullies and even rivers and lakes — though on Titan, it's so cold the lakes are filled with liquid methane, not water.
"It is this complete package," she says. "It's this really unique place in the solar system where all of these different processes are coming together in a very Earthlike way."
The NASA space probe Cassini used infrared light to peer through Titan's hazy atmosphere and take rough measurements of its surface.
Turtle says these features are part of what made Titan a target. It also appears that the surface is covered in organic molecules. The climate is probably too harsh for those molecules to make the shift into life, but Turtle thinks Titan could provide clues about how the building blocks of life started on Earth.
"All of these materials have been basically doing chemistry experiments for us," she says. "What we want to be able to do is go pick up the results of those experiments to understand the same kinds of steps that were taken here on Earth toward life."
Titan has one more feature that's worth noting: Although its mainly nitrogen atmosphere is denser than Earth's, its gravity is far lower. That makes it the perfect place to take to the skies.
"The conditions on Titan make it easier to fly there than on Earth," says Peter Bedini, the Dragonfly project manager. A drone is actually a much better way to explore such a world than a wheeled rover.
Dragonfly will launch from Earth in 2026 and arrive on Titan in 2034. After it enters the atmosphere, it will literally drop from the back of the capsule that brought it and fly down to a set of sandy dunes on the surface. From there, it will make a series of "hops" over two years, sampling the ground and sending back data and photos.
Unlike other space probes, Dragonfly will simply buzz away from its landing shell.
NASAYouTube
Adams is confident Dragonfly will be able to safely buzz across Titan's terrain. Because it can take nearly an hour-and-a-half for a signal to reach Titan from Earth, it will have to fly autonomously. But, he says, there's not a lot to run into: "We make the joke if we hit a tree, then we win because we found a tree on Titan," he says.
Adams plans to leverage a lot of technology from the recent drone revolution here on Earth. Radars, motors and software can all be used, or relatively easily adapted, for Dragonfly.
There is one thing he can't bring, however: "We don't actually have a map. There's no GPS; there's no magnetic field even to orient yourself," he says. He says the drone will navigate by continuously photographing the landscape, creating its own "map" as it goes.
For now, the Dragonfly team is still working with drones here on Earth to figure out how to build systems and software the probe will eventually need. But Turtle says they have time before the 2026 launch. "There's a lot to do between now and then," says Turtle. But she adds, it's all very doable.
Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda. By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy. Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously. MORE: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/ Posted by Jamie B.
The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night -- And Could Hand Trump A Second Term (Photo: Photos: Getty Images) Americans will almost certainly go to bed on Nov. 3 without knowing who won the presidential election. Since millions of people will vote by mail, constraints on time and resources will slow ballot counting into potentially a weeks-long process. Voting patterns suggest it’s likely that President Donald Trump could end Election Day in the lead in certain key states, only to be overtaken by Democratic opponent Joe Biden when more votes are tallied. This could create a nightmare scenario during the three months stretching from Election Day to the Jan. 20 inauguration: a battle on the state and congressional level over who is the legitimate winner. This could include Congress reconvening on Jan. 6, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence , with no consensus over its potential role in choosing the next president. This is arguably the most likely of th
Here is an interesting question in my list of philosophical questions: 1.) Should governments have penalties for those who live unhealthy lifestyles? A list of unhealthy lifestyles would include things like smoking, drinking, illegal drugs, prostitution, and other “vice” type activities. I guess the “government penalties” would be referring to monetary punishments, withholding medical treatments (insurance companies would love that), possibly imposing/regulating very high (exorbitant) prices on things considered unhealthy in order to cut down on their use, and other possibilities. 2.) Or, would you say that living an unhealthy lifestyle, likely resulting in a LOT of eventual personal pain and suffering, should be punishment enough for unhealthy lifestyles? When people make bad choices in life, often in their youth where ignorance and immediate gratification takes them over, 3.) Should a society be obligated to help "fix" them, by way of tax money? Is that part of
Comments
Post a Comment