Meet The Nuclear-Powered Self-Driving Drone NASA Is Sending To A Moon Of Saturn
Almost everyone who learns about the project thinks it sounds "crazy," admits one scientist. But the technology should work.
On the face of it, NASA's newest probe sounds incredible. Known as Dragonfly, it is a dual-rotor quadcopter (technically an octocopter, even more technically an X8 octocopter); it's roughly the size of a compact car; it's completely autonomous; it's nuclear powered; and it will hover above the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.
But Elizabeth Turtle, the mission's principle investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, insists that this is actually a pretty tame space probe, as
