Good morning I'm Peter Bedini a program manager in a space exploration sector
been at APL now for about 16 years I'm going to talk about the Dragonfly
mission concept but first let me take a minute give a little background there
are two types of NASA science missions there are strategic missions where the
work is assigned to a particular organization to implement and then there
are competed missions which are those that are actually selected in an open
competition in planetary exploration there are two primary programs of
competed missions there's the discovery program in which our APL's messenger
spacecraft was part of that and then there's the larger new frontiers program
the first mission of which was the New Horizons mission also by APL the two
other new frontiers missions that have been selected are the Juno mission which
is now circling chip on Jupiter and IO Sirus Rex mission which launched last
September and it's on its way to an asteroid from which is going to return a
sample to earth dragonfly is being proposed by APL to be
the fourth mission in the new frontiers program if they select us now when you
first hear the high-concept the dragonfly it might seem a little
ambitious or maybe even audacious but I hope in the next several minutes going
through these slides I'll expand on that concept and demonstrate that it's not
just a bit very compelling concept but that we have a viable formulation for it
and it's well worth nasa's investment
dragonfly proposes to send a nuclear quadcopter to look for life on Saturn's
moon Titan seems kind of straightforward or partly or arbitrary but let's explain
this and see that it isn't first of all let's talk about Titan the target Titan
is the largest moon of Saturn it's shown here along with its very small many
neighbors it is an ocean world it's the designation for only a few
places in the solar system which are thought to hold the ingredients for life
others are the Europa which is a moon Jupiter and also Enceladus which is
another movement here much smaller moon of Saturn but unique about Titan is that
it's got a liquid cycle very much like Earth's water cycle but it's with
methane so it's a hydrocarbon version of our water cycle and no other place in
the solar system has that now Titan is known to be very rich in complex organic
materials and we know that largely by the observations from Cassini that
mission has been flying for 12 years studying the Saturn system and Titan as
part of that it also put a probe called Huygens down on the surface back in 2005
so we know a fair amount about Titan but there's still a lot we don't know and in
particular the composition of the surface remains largely unknown
dragonfly proposes to characterize the habitability of the Titan environment
it's going to investigate how far a prebiotic chemistry has progressed on it
and it's going to look for chemical signatures indicative of water or either
carbon-based light so we're not exactly looking for five legged creatures
running around or something like that although if we did confront one of those
we'd be sure to take a selfie and send it home the four measurements that
dragonfly will make to accomplish those objectives are here mass spectrometry
will show us the composition of the surface and of the atmosphere gamma ray
spectroscopy will tell us the elemental composition below the surface we have a
meteorology and geophysics sensor package which will tell us about the
atmospheric conditions and also using a little geophone it might tell us whether
there's seismic activity on Titan or not and of course there's a camera suite
which gives us context for the Institute measurements it helps us find our next
landing site when we're flying and also characterizes the geologic nature of the
surface because this is the competition I didn't want to put our actual images
on here so these are representative we don't have brownie cameras Andre
now we could take a lander and we could plop it down on Titan we could take
these four measurements at one place and we would significantly increase our
understanding of Titan and it's similar moons or bodies like it in other ocean
worlds however we can multiply the value of this mission if we add aerial
mobility because now we can look at this very diverse surface that is Titan it's
got a variety of geologic settings instead of just measuring in one place
we can go to many places and increase the science returns substantially by
moving around now Rovers do offer mobility but it's much more limited and
it's also subject to subjected to the traffic ability of the surface you can
get an obstacle that will stop a rover if you have aerial flight you can go
over or around an obstacle you also increase the range hugely by having an
aerial mobility instead of just a rover and in particular in just a few flights
dragonfly will be able to go farther than the opportunity Rover on Mars has
in the last 12 years so it's really a different paradigm the image on the
bottom gear is from Cassini data is a projection of Titan and you can see in
the middle area here there is this dark area that is smooth sands the brighter
areas away from that are perhaps more challenging landscapes or different
geological settings so our approach here is to land in the introduce flats in
this black smooth sand area and then we can navigate with different hops to more
interesting or diverse places to take measurements so let me stop here for a
second we know that we want to go to Titan
we know that looking for life barriers of super supreme importance to the
science community we know what questions we want to answer we know what
measurements we need to take the answer those questions and we have a plan to do
this in many many different spots to characterize Titan in a more broad way
than just doing like a single Pathfinder but what makes this the real clincher
for this concept and what makes it really a viable formula
is this it turns out that the easiest place in the solar system to fly a
quadcopter is on Titan that's because plates got an atmosphere
more than four times as dense as Earth's and the gravity is only 1/7 that over so
a human on Titan could put on some wings flap arms and actually fly as a matter
of fact if this guy had been doing this on Titan instead of on earth he would
have had a much better go of it this is a plot of a couple very important
parameters for aerodynamic flight and it shows that dragonfly which is this Titan
Explorer here in the blue he's in a very comfortable range in a flight regime
it's actually near ultralight aircraft wind turbines it's very understandable
the characteristics of flight in that environment by clock-out they're quite
understandable the quadcopter is actually quite straightforward there's
no gearbox like a helicopter it's straight drive direct drive motors
there's been a drone revolution of sorts in the last dozen years and there are
everywhere and the flight control algorithms and the flight
characteristics are very very well understood we're using an X 8
configuration that's this double quad double rotor on four different arms
that's for redundancy primarily we can lose a couple of these rotors staying in
which they are and mission keeps on going we show here the high gain antenna
in its stowed position once we get onto the surface we'll deploy that and it's
got a two axis gimbal we will be communicating directly from the rotor
craft to earth we do not need an asset flying around Titan to help with that in
the left is to launch configuration the top part is a heat shield that will keep
it from burning up when it enters Titan's atmosphere there's a back shell
on the bottom where the thing is tucked in and then the very bottom on the left
picture here is the cruise stage mostly a propulsion system that helps get us to
Titan I'll show you more about that in a minute
now Saturn is really far away so it's simply impractical to propose that the
power for this system would come from solar arrays you've seen the big solar
arrays on spacecraft that Jupiter and closer in Merc makes perfect sense to do
that but when you get out of Saturn these arrays would have to be so large
or maybe using new technology or both luckily NASA is made available what they
call MMR TGS these are that stands for multi-mission
radioisotope thermoelectric generators RTGS have been used in space missions
for decades this is a small version of an RTG and one just like this is
powering the Curiosity rover that's on Mars now a bigger one of these an older
type is actually powering a new horizon spacecraft now is it as Pluto and is
going to its next target they put out constant power but a lot of waste heat
so we're taking advantage of some of that waste heat and directing that into
the body of the craft so that we can keep these electronics running at a cozy
room temperature which saves a lot of work and don't have to worry about
electronics running in a cold environment also the power coming from
the RTG simply charges our battery and then we actually operate off of the
battery it takes a long time to get to Titan especially now the Jupiter is not
in a friendly place to use as a gravity boost it will take a little longer but
we have pertinent recent experience with very long cruise phases with the New
Horizons mission and we're going to leverage that experience especially with
using hibernation modes and with low cost operations this is a schematic of
the entry into the Titan environment you see on the top left the cruise stage is
still attached to the capsule that gets jettisoned a drogue chute comes out
slows things down then it pulls out a main chute you can see the heat shield
then being dropped off in the middle while we're still descending and by the
way this is not a fast descent it's not like the minutes on Mars or on earth
this is actually going to be more than an hour we have a leisurely float down
because of the thick atmosphere we actually while we're still on the
our shoe we will turn on the sensors we have for landing it's a robust set of
redundant sensors including live our radar and cameras and then we will power
up separate the backshell and actually land on our own power now this is the
most challenging part of the mission only because we have the least to say
about where precisely we land here then we will later later on we'll have
lecture your going out doing a little survey and reconnaissance picking a
place and then sequencing to go right there
this one we're doing the best we can to pick a hospitable place in the smooth
sands and we're coming down and we do have some control at the end there with
our our own power to move in case there's some big obstacle like a big
tree or something like that that we need to miss but of course if we hit a tree
we win so we come down and this is a schematic of these inter dune flats area
and it just shows again coming down with the back shell and then then landing on
its own once we've landed we deploy the antenna as I said we'll be communicating
directly with earth so there's no need for a orbiting relay asset and a one
Titan day is about 16 earth days which means that with our baseline plan of
flying once for Titan day we have ample time to take our measurements send it
back to earth charge up the battery take another flight we have time in between
the flights to get the sequence right after we pick a location and send it up
so it's a it's not a very farid cadence and it's because we have this constant
power from the RTG that'll ask if that power decays all it means is we take a
little longer to charge this battery here we'll pick up and go off again to
another landing site now our partners on basically have many partners but we the
Penn State University center of excellence for vertical lift they're one
of three in the country built this half scale model for us this is the first
autonomous flight it's a milestone of sorts it's a completely program sequence
just like we will do on even the only difference is this it's
told to find a couple different GPS waypoints and then come back and land
where it took off so you'll see here that it is up it's going this testbed if
we are selected to go forward we will use extensively to develop the algorithm
for flight and for landing we'll develop it a little more and add some of the
landing sensors that we need to put in to test that interface and as we go
further into the mission we will develop a full-scale test bed to a model to fly
around to the greater degree as we can we want to test as we fly so I'll be
using this to do some cold temperature operation and we will change the
algorithms and test faults and things like that
by the way these rotors are actually constantly spinning but there's this
resonance with the frames per second that makes it look like a strobe here I
assure you they are spinning constantly and here it is coming back down in front
of the big red harvester or whatever that is that it took off from now the
folks at Penn State have also rigged this thing up to look more like the
drawings I was showing you that we expect the thing to look like a little
less aerodynamic than this they put a cylinder in the back for the RTG and
they put a box around it and this is just another sample of it taking off in
slow motion I assure you that the flight unit on Titan will not have tennis balls
for landing here but for right now that that's just pret very practical so that
is the dragonfly concept explained I hope you agree that it is compelling and
I think it is quite a viable and feasible and we hope that NASA agrees
and is willing to take a chance on us thank you very much