Meet The Nuclear-Powered Self-Driving Drone NASA Is Sending To A Moon Of Saturn

On the face of it, NASA's newest probe sounds incredible. Known as Dragonfly, it is a dual-rotor quadcopter (technically an octocopter, even more technically an X8 octocopter); it's roughly the size of a compact car; it's completely autonomous; it's nuclear powered; and it will hover above the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. But Elizabeth Turtle, the mission's principle investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, insists that this is actually a pretty tame space probe, as these things go. "There's not a lot of new technology," she says. Quadcopters (even X8 octocopters) are for sale on Amazon these days.