Research at Embry-Riddle will help design the aerodynamics of a rotorcraft that will land on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, as part of NASA’s Dragonfly mission to explore Titan’s chemistry and habitability.
The research is supported by a NASA New Frontiers program contract of $475,000 granted to Dr. Michael Kinzel, associate professor in Embry-Riddle’s Department of Aerospace Engineering.
Titan is being explored because images of the moon provided by the Cassini orbiter have shown it has a dense atmosphere and methane clouds, rain that flows into lakes, and seas and substantial organic material on its surface — all considered the building blocks of life.
“This rotorcraft is intended to measure as much of Titan as it can,” says Kinzel. “So, there are also opportunities to utilize how rotors kick up dust to measure key characteristics of the dunes. Understanding the sand character enables scientists to infer the prevailing winds that form the sand dunes.”
Kinzel said his team of researchers was “the first group to bring high-fidelity computational models of fluids to the mission,” using high-performance computing to run hundreds to thousands of computer simulations to characterize the aerodynamics of Dragonfly’s operation.
The design of the Dragonfly rotorcraft is led by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, with collaboration from the Embry-Riddle team, along with Penn State and Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company.