Just a couple of years ago NASA first tested its Ingenuity helicopter in the skies over Mars. Now they want to send their Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered drone, to Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
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00:00 Just a couple of years ago NASA tested its Ingenuity helicopter in the skies
00:07 over Mars. The little aircraft was the first step in better exploring alien
00:11 worlds and NASA just announced the next off-world flyer they want to build. This
00:15 is what they're calling the Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered drone they
00:19 want to send to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The whole thing will be around the
00:23 size of a car, so comparable to their most recent flagship Mars rovers, but
00:27 it's going to have more hurdles to jump through than Ingenuity had on the Red
00:30 Planet, which is why wind testing is already underway, putting their prototype
00:34 through the paces, with test lead Bernadine Giuliano saying about it, "We
00:38 completed more than 700 total runs, encompassing over 4,000 individual data
00:43 points. All test objectives were successfully accomplished and the data
00:46 will help increase confidence in our simulation models on Earth before
00:50 extrapolating to Titan conditions." So what are Titans conditions? Well, unlike
00:54 Mars, Titan's atmosphere is actually much thicker than Earth's, about three and a
00:58 half times more dense, but Titan is also less than half the size of our planet,
01:02 with less gravity than our moon, which will no doubt be good for an aircraft.
01:06 This would be the beginning of NASA's next big step in space exploration, with
01:10 putting human boots back on the moon and on the Martian surface for the first
01:13 time being their most immediate goals.
01:17 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:21 (upbeat music)