Rotorcraft Flight on Saturn's Largest Moon Titan: An Integrated Approach for Extraterrestrial Vertical Flight

Rotorcraft Flight on an extraterrestrial body presents unique engineering challenges. The NASA Dragonfly mission features a vertical flight vehicle that will explore the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The Dragonfly mission necessitates that the challenges of extraterrestrial vertical flight be understood and addressed. Legacy verification methods for terrestrial rotorcraft systems are relatively uniform and consistent. However, there are inherent limitations when legacy methods are applied to flight on other planetary bodies. The differing environmental conditions between Earth and Titan pose one set of challenges, and there are no practical means of performing verification flight testing on Earth. Furthermore, flight must be fully autonomous due to the vast distances under which communications with the vehicle must span. The NASA Dragonfly mission is employing an integrated, multi-domain approach for system verification to address these challenges.