Missions · Space Codex
Dragonfly
An eight-rotor, nuclear-powered drone that will hop between sites on Titan, sampling organic sand and the floor of an impact crater.
A rotorcraft for Titan
At a glance
Key points
- Launch no earlier than July 2028
- Arrives at Titan in late 2034
- Rotorcraft on another world's moon
Flying is easier on Titan
With air 1.5 times denser than Earth's and gravity one-seventh as strong, a rotorcraft needs far less power than it would here. Dragonfly can cover kilometres per flight.
Fly, land, recharge, repeat
Dragonfly will not fly continuously. A Titan day lasts about 16 Earth days, and the plan is roughly one flight every one or two of them. Between flights the plutonium generator slowly tops up the battery while the instruments work on the ground. Each hop can cover tens of kilometres in under an hour, so over its 3.3-year mission the craft can travel from the landing dunes toward Selk Crater, far faster than any wheeled rover has managed on Mars.
A chemistry lab that flies
The DrACO drill collects surface material and blows it pneumatically into DraMS, a mass spectrometer from NASA Goddard and France's CNES that looks for the building blocks of biology. DraGNS reads the elemental make-up of the ground beneath the lander, DragonCam images the terrain from the air and up close, and DraGMet, built with JAXA, records weather, the properties of the ground and any Titan-quakes.
Building it
Assembly at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory moved forward through 2026: heat-shield testing in June, key structural tests in July and installation of the wiring harness on the flight fuselage, the first step in connecting its electrical system. In September the IAU approved a name for the landing region, Ahmakiq Undae, after a Mayan spirit invoked to hold back crop-damaging winds; NASA renders it 'one who locks up the wind'.
What we still don't know
Whether Selk Crater's melt once mixed liquid water with Titan's organics long enough for prebiotic chemistry to advance.
Missions
- Launch NET Jul 2028
Dragonfly
NASAPlannedNuclear-powered rotorcraft; arrives at Titan around 2034 for a 3.3-year mission.
Related entries
Sources
- NASA Science: Dragonfly (opens in a new tab)
- NASA Science: Dragonfly blog, Sep 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- NASA Science: Dragonfly rotorcraft and instruments (opens in a new tab)
Last reviewed against these sources. Built from public NASA, ESA and JPL data; not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency.