This is NASA’s Nuclear-Powered Dragonfly Rotorcraft a Drone They Want to Send to Saturn’s Moon Titan

Amaze Lab

Just a couple of years ago NASA first tested its Ingenuity helicopter in the skies over Mars. Now they want to send their Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered drone, to Saturn’s largest moon Titan.

Transcript

00:00 Just a couple of years ago NASA tested its Ingenuity helicopter in the skies

00:07 over Mars. The little aircraft was the first step in better exploring alien

00:11 worlds and NASA just announced the next off-world flyer they want to build. This

00:15 is what they're calling the Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered drone they

00:19 want to send to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The whole thing will be around the

00:23 size of a car, so comparable to their most recent flagship Mars rovers, but

00:27 it's going to have more hurdles to jump through than Ingenuity had on the Red

00:30 Planet, which is why wind testing is already underway, putting their prototype

00:34 through the paces, with test lead Bernadine Giuliano saying about it, "We

00:38 completed more than 700 total runs, encompassing over 4,000 individual data

00:43 points. All test objectives were successfully accomplished and the data

00:46 will help increase confidence in our simulation models on Earth before

00:50 extrapolating to Titan conditions." So what are Titans conditions? Well, unlike

00:54 Mars, Titan's atmosphere is actually much thicker than Earth's, about three and a

00:58 half times more dense, but Titan is also less than half the size of our planet,

01:02 with less gravity than our moon, which will no doubt be good for an aircraft.

01:06 This would be the beginning of NASA's next big step in space exploration, with

01:10 putting human boots back on the moon and on the Martian surface for the first

01:13 time being their most immediate goals.

01:17 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:21 (upbeat music)

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