Planetary Exploration with Ingenuity and Dragonfly: Rotary-Wing Flight on Mars and Titan

Planetary Exploration with Ingenuity and Dragonfly aims to lay out to ‘space people’ what they need to know about rotorcraft, and to ‘helicopter people’ what they need to know about delivering vehicles through space and operating them on other planets. Ingenuity is a small, solar-powered robotic helicopter which landed on Mars, along with the Perseverance rover, as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission on February 18, 2021. On April 19 of that year, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to complete a powered, controlled flight on another planet. It climbed to 3 meters (10 feet) and maintained a stable hover for 30 seconds. It has since conducted more than 20 flights covering over 5 kilometers (3 miles) in total. Dragonfly is a much larger rotorcraft that is currently scheduled to launch in 2027 and arrive on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, by 2034. This multi-rotor vehicle, a relocatable lander roughly the size of Perseverance, is intended to explore dozens of sites across Titan’s diverse landscape and access surface materials of interest for prebiotic chemistry. Dragonfly is expected to fly many kilometers in each of dozens of flights. This book is not a formal textbook on rotorcraft, nor on spacecraft engineering. But it does outline the basics of these distinct endeavors and their intersections and explains how Ingenuity and Dragonfly came about, and how their very different designs respond to different goals and operating environments. References are provided for the interested reader to delve further. The book is not a history either, but a snapshot: Ingenuity’s story is not quite finished, and much of Dragonfly’s story lies in future. This is a synthesis of the state of the art today, in a narrative on planetary aviation that is just beginning.