Dragonfly Parachute Decelerator System Overview

This publication is a high-level summary of the parachute decelerator system (PDS) utilized on NASA’s Dragonfly Mission to Titan, Saturn’s moon. The Dragonfly Mission will have been the second time that a spacecraft has landed on Titan, the first was the Huygens mission in 2005. The Dragonfly mission is scheduled to launch in 2028, and aims to send an autonomous, dual-quadcopter rotorcraft to Titan. Airborne Systems has had recent success qualifying the supersonic parachute used on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover PDS, and aims to leverage that heritage on the Dragonfly PDS. The Dragonfly mission brings very unique challenges due to the flight environment and the complexities of a two parachute system, that require extensive development and qualification work.