Eye on Dragonfly

Interested in learning more? Watch Eye on Dragonfly Live, an inside look at the mission’s progress, livestreamed here on July 16 at 2 p.m. ET. Hear from Dragonfly scientists and engineers, direct from the clean room, as they discuss the spacecraft’s latest milestones in integration and testing, explain how Dragonfly will explore Titan, and answer audience questions about the mission.

From May through early June, engineers and technicians at APL put the Dragonfly rotorcraft through vibration and sealing tests designed to show that the fuselage’s structural backbone can withstand the loads of launch, entry through Titan’s atmosphere, and landing on the surface of this ocean world.

For vibration testing, the team installed mass simulators in place of the flight instruments and electronics being built and tested elsewhere. The ground vibration test gave the team a fleeting preview of Dragonfly in the air. Engineers suspended the rotorcraft’s structure a few inches off the ground from long bungee cords, then measured how mechanical vibrations at the rotor locations traveled through the frame to key sensors on the main body.

“Suspended for a few hours during that test — even barely above the floor — was structurally akin to Dragonfly’s first flight,” said Gordon Maahs, the Dragonfly mechanical systems engineer from APL. “It gets the imagination going about what actual flight will look like.”

The test also included a “sit down” configuration, lowering the lander onto protective padding so it rested on its skids while engineers measured how the structure would respond on Titan’s surface.

The sealing test was more unusual. Most planetary spacecraft are built for the vacuum of space or worlds with thin atmospheres. But Dragonfly is headed to Titan, where the surface atmosphere is dense, cold, and about 1.5 times the pressure of Earth’s, so engineers needed to understand how well the assembled structure could keep that environment out. The solution: pressurize Dragonfly’s outer structure to identify any gaps, cracks, or holes that could allow airflow in and out of the lander on Titan.

“I’ve never seen a test like it on any other spacecraft,” Maahs said. “We get a total flow rate based off of the sealing test, and that feeds our thermal analysis to determine if we’re sealed enough.”

The results, Maahs added, were “extremely good.”