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Title: 'Dragonfly' Mission to Saturn's Moon Titan: Behind Schedule,
Overbudget, Says NASA Inspector General

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/14/0...

After its six-year journey to Saturn's moon Titan, Dragonfly's rotorcraft
lander "will fly like a large drone," explains its web page, spending three
years sampling multiple landing sites to characterize Titan's habitability
and look for "precursors of the origin of life." "However, the project has
undergone multiple replans impacting cost and schedule, resulting in a life-
cycle cost increase of nearly $1 billion and over 2 years of delays,"
according to an announcement from NASA's Inspector General. From the
Inspector General's report: The cost increase and schedule delay were largely
the result of NASA directing [Johns Hopkins University] Applied Physics
Laboratory to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in
Dragonfly's development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-
19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch
vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation." But its higher-than-
expected life-cycle cost over $3 billion "will continue to absorb an
increasing proportion of the Planetary Science Division's total budget,"
meaning Dragonfly's increased cost (and "additional budget constraints" have
"contributed to a gap of at least 12 years in New Frontiers [planetary
science] mission launches, and will jeopardize future priorities outlined in
the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (National
Academies) decadal surveys." Yet a NASA press release notes the mission "has
cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on
track toward launch in July 2028." Its software-defined radio has been
completed, and the part of the spectrometer which analyzes Titan's chemical
components for "potentially biologically relevant" compounds (as well as
structural and thermal testing of the lander's insulation). "The mission is
scheduled to launch in July 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from
NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader
schwit1 for spotting this news on the space/science blog "Behind the Black".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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