How to Conquer Titan With a Nuclear Quad Octocopter

In December, NASA announced two finalist concepts for a robotic mission that will launch in the mid-2020s. The first is the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR), which would send a fairly conventional spacecraft over to a comet to grab a chunk of its nucleus and bring it back to Earth. That's cool and all, but we're much more excited about the second finalist concept: Dragonfly, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL), a quad octocopter that would explore Saturn's moon Titan from the air. The idea is that it would work like a planetary rover, except that it would fly instead of drive, allowing it to cover much more ground at the risk of, you know, crashing. We've seen lots of drones that can do amazing things, and also lots of drones that crash very, very badly while trying to do amazing things. Sending a fully autonomous flying robot to an alien world over a billion kilometers away and expecting it to fly around for a couple years without any human intervention seems extraordinarily ambitious, so we checked in with APL to see exactly what they're working on.