Dragonfly Selected as NASA’s next New Frontiers Mission
Dragonfly Selected as NASA’s next New Frontiers Mission
Honeybee Robotics is developing a sample acquisition and delivery system for Dragonfly, NASA’s next New Frontiers mission, led by Principal Investigator Elizabeth Turtle of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander that will explore Saturn’s large moon Titan. The sampling system called DrACO (Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics) will extract material from Titan’s surface and deliver it to DraMS (Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center). Honeybee Robotics will build the end-to-end DrACO system (including hardware, avionics, and flight software) and will command its operation once Dragonfly lands on Titan in 2034.
