Regina Garcia
NASA has advanced its Dragonfly lunar lander mission after passing the technical requirements and standards of the preliminary design review.
The weeklong assessment covered spacecraft design, mission requirements, science plans, schedule, risk and other related topics, team lead John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said Friday.
The team passed the review, which included over 60 presentations to a panel of external experts tasked with evaluating and assessing mission progress for NASA. The space agency will consider the board’s findings in a confirmation review that’s scheduled later this year.
The Dragonfly mission aims to explore Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. The mission will employ a rotorcraft-lander, which will travel between and sample diverse sites on the moon, in order to characterize the habitability of the lunar environment.
“APL, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Lockheed Martin, and all of our partners really came together to deliver a credible technical baseline. The fidelity and thought that went into each decision was clearly communicated and forms a solid foundation upon which the team can build,” said Bobby Braun, head of APL’s space exploration sector.
