NASA’s Dragonfly mission team, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), has successfully passed a weeklong Preliminary Design Review (PDR) to demonstrate that the flight project is on track. The PDR, which is a requirement for all NASA missions, covers topics such as spacecraft design, mission requirements, science plans, schedule, cost, and risk. The review included more than 60 presentations to a panel of external experts tasked with evaluating and assessing mission progress for NASA. Dragonfly is being designed and built under the direction of APL, which manages the mission and will build and operate the Dragonfly lander. The team includes key partners at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Lockheed Martin Space, NASA’s Ames Research Center, Penn State University, Malin Space Science Systems, Honeybee Robotics, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the French space agency (CNES), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program and aims to employ a rotorcraft-lander to travel between and sample diverse sites on Saturn’s moon Titan.
