(Credit: NASA)Īfter entry, the timelines diverge. Final timing and trajectory are dependent on launch vehicle selected. Huygens was part of ESA’s element of the Cassini mission, and the aeroshell for Huygens was built by a consortium led by Aerospatiale.Īt Mars, the EDL event is colloquially and somewhat lovingly called the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” referring to the length of time it takes a spacecraft to touch down on the surface after entering the atmosphere.įor Dragonfly, the first part of the EDL sequence, entry, will be somewhat similar to those at Mars, with similar heating and initial supersonic entry dynamics that are well understood at Mars and can be properly modeled and studied for Titan thanks in part to the Huygens probe’s landing.Ī preliminary mission timeline for the cruise phase and entry operations. 15, 2005.ĭata from the success of that mission is feeding into the design for Dragonfly, but so are the past landings of Mars missions - to which Lockheed Martin has direct experience. The honor went to the Huygens probe, a part of the Cassini mission which landed on Titan on Jan. ![]() While this will be the largest lander sent to Titan and the first designed to fly autonomously through its atmosphere, it will not be the first probe to land on the moon. Those lower loads mean that portions of the aeroshell’s design don’t have to be as rigid as those used by Lockheed Martin on the aeroshells for the Mars missions. “In this case, we can take advantage of that dense atmosphere, have smaller parachutes, which also means lower loads.” See Also “At Mars, you have to rapidly slow yourself down, rapidly have that descent because you don’t have much of an atmosphere,” said Dave Buecher, Lockheed Martin Dragonfly program manager, in an interview with NASASpaceflight. This combination of a dense atmosphere and low gravity change elements for Dragonfly’s EDL over those of the Mars missions. However, their atmospheres are vastly different, with Titan’s measuring 1.19 times denser than Earth’s. Like Mars, Titan has weak gravity at only 0.1 G. While Titan is a moon of Saturn, for EDL, it can be thought of as a planet.Ĭompared to Earth, Mars is small, with 0.3 G surface gravity and an atmosphere less than one percent of our home planet’s. Three main considerations for an EDL sequence are the specific gravity, atmospheric thickness, and atmospheric composition of the planet where the landing will occur. ![]() Since the focus on Martian exploration ramped up in the mid-1990s, most of the familiarity with the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) sequence of landers and rovers to the surface of other planets has taken place against the backdrop of Mars.īut when NASA‘s upcoming Dragonfly mission arrives at Titan for its own EDL, it will experience a starkly different set of conditions that both add new complexity and ease some structural considerations for the system that will deliver the rotorcraft into Titan’s atmosphere.
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