NASA has chosen SpaceX to launch the Dragonfly mission, a rotorcraft lander designed to explore Saturn's moon Titan, as part of the New Frontiers program. The mission aims to collect material samples and analyze surface composition across various geological conditions, searching for the building blocks of life.
The fixed-price contract is valued at approximately $256.6 million, covering launch services and associated mission expenses. The targeted launch window for Dragonfly is set from July 5 to July 25, 2028, using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Dragonfly employs an innovative approach to planetary exploration, utilizing a rotorcraft to navigate between diverse sites on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, to gather samples. In collaboration with global partners, the Dragonfly payload will assess the habitability of Titan's environment, investigate the evolution of prebiotic chemistry, and search for chemical signs indicating whether water or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on the moon.
The Dragonfly team, managed by NASA's Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, consists of scientists, engineers, technologists, and managers with extensive experience in missions that have explored the solar system from the Sun to Pluto and beyond, as well as experts in rotorcraft, autonomous flight, and space systems worldwide.
Dragonfly marks the fourth mission in NASA's New Frontiers program, overseen by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.