NASA Selects SpaceX Falcon Heavy to Launch Dragonfly
An artist's rendition of the Dragonfly probe flies over a landscape on Titan. Image credit NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
SpaceX will continue its streak of launching important scientific missions for NASA by sending Dragonfly to the outer solar system on a Falcon Heavy. The launch will occur as early as July 2028.
Dragonfly will travel to Saturn’s moon, Titan. It will become the first uncrewed probe to fly on a moon in the outer solar system. The rotorcraft-style flight will give it the capacity to travel between scientifically interesting sites faster than a rover can.
(If you remember that NASA already did something like this, you’re right! The Ingenuity mini-helicopter hitched a ride to Mars with the Perseverance helicopter and became the first “drone” to fly on another planet in April 2021.)
Once it reaches Titan, it will search for signs that it could support life or might have had life at some point in its history. Although NASA has found tantalizing clues of potential past habitability on other worlds like Mars, it has never confirmed the presence of life on other worlds in our solar system.
Dragonfly is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. New Frontiers tackles planetary exploration goals identified as “high priority” by the scientific community. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and its moons was the first successful mission in the New Frontiers program. Other missions include OSIRIS-REx (the first successful asteroid return mission) and Juno (a probe that has orbited Jupiter since 2016).
Dragonfly’s launch and related services will cost $256.6 million. The relatively high cost of a SpaceX launch includes more complex preparations that account for Dragonfly’s power source, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). The RTG is a nuclear battery that converts heat from the decay of radioactive isotopes into electricity. This delicate power source is one of the few that will reliably work in the outer solar system, where sunlight is much dimmer than on Mars or Venus, and requires extra care during launch.
SpaceX previously launched Europa Clipper toward Jupiter’s moon, Europa, on October 14, 2024. It also launched the Psyche probe toward the asteroid of the same name on October 13, 2023. Both missions also used the Falcon Heavy.
