Dragonfly: A Proposal to Explore Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon, via Quadcopter

A team from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland is proposing an instrumented, radioisotope-powered dual-quadcopter to explore Titan, one of a number of "ocean worlds" in our solar system that hold the ingredients for life.

Dragonfly, recently named one of two finalists for a NASA New Frontiers mission, would explore Titan's surface. The moon is known to be covered with rich organic material, which is undergoing chemical processes that might be similar to those on early Earth, before life developed.

APL's Peter Bedini, program manager for Dragonfly, details the proposal's engineering and science.