Ralph Lorenz

"Dragonfly : A Relocatable Rotorcraft Lander for Titan"

ABSTRACT -- Saturn's giant moon Titan has been revealed to be remarkably Earth-like, with a landscape of vast dunefields, river channels and lakes under a smoggy sky punctuated by methane downpours. Titan has a rich inventory of complex organic molecules that may provide clues how the building blocks of life are assembled. NASA recently selected APL's Dragonfly mission concept as the next $1B-class New Frontiers mission to launch in 2027, to arrive in the mid-2030s. Dragonfly is an octocopter lander, able to repeatedly take off and fly many kilometers in Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity to sample the surface in a wide range of geological settings. This presentation will describe how the concept originated and some of the its features in a range of technical domains from aeronautics to nuclear physics to machine vision.

SPEAKER -- Ralph Lorenz worked as an engineer for the European Space Agency on the design of the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan, and as a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, and since 2006, at the JHU AppliedPhysics Lab. He is associated with NASA's InSight and Perseverance missions at Mars and the Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki. He is the Mission Architect for Dragonfly, NASA's next New Frontiers Mission, and is the Atmospheric Structure investigation lead on GSFC's DAVINCI+ Discovery proposal. He is author or co-author of nine books including Spinning Flight, Cassini-Huygens Owners Workshop Maunal, Exploring Planetary Climate, and Space Systems Failures, as well as over 300 journal publications.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov