Real Mission - Dragonfly Mission to Titan (Stock or Modded)

[IonStorm]

On 1/5/2018 at 10:34 AM, Jetski said:

As i read it NASA is running a series of programs called New Frontiers that includes the OSIRIS-REx mission  (which was also super fun Challenge by @IonStorm).  They just accepted 2 new proposals as finalists for further development and study, one of which is Dragonfly. Let's show how well we can do it with Kerbals

New Frontiers is the mid-sized planetary missions and the largest principal investigator lead ones.  The programmatic goal is to select two missions per decade.  So far New Horizons (Pluto/MU69), Juno (Jupiter), OSIRIS-REx (Bennu), and either Dragonfly (Titan) or CAESAR (67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko) are the missions.  Both Dragonfly and CAESAR are cool (and tied for first place in science), but I'm a member of the CAESAR team (which will use ion propulsion to collect and return a sample of the icy surface of the comet that ESA's Rosetta mission mapped).  The two teams will work for a year to refine the risk posture and engineering requirements so the New Frontiers program can select one.  Learn more about New Frontiers here https://planetarymissions.nasa.gov/missions/new frontiers.

Information about CAESAR will be made public on January 17, 2018 at 3:15pm PST at the Small Bodies Assessment Group meeting.  You can watch for free here https://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/.  I presume that Dragonfly will have information at the Outer Planets Assessment Group https://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/ but I'm not particularly plugged in to that community.  Both missions will have 5 abstracts each at the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.  They will be posted here https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2018/ However, since it is still an active competition between the two mission concepts, not all details are public yet. 

Discovery are the small planetary missions, and are also principal investigator lead.  These are NEAR (Eros), Pathfinder (Mars), Prospector (Moon), Stardust (81P/Wild 2), Genesis (solar wind), CONTOUR (two comets; lost), MESSENGER (Mercury), Deep Impact (9P/Tempel 1), Dawn (Vesta/Ceres), Kepler (exoplanets; now operated by astrophysics), GRAIL (Moon), InSight (Mars; launching this year), Lucy (Trojan asteroids; in development), and Psyche (Psyche; in development). There are also follow-on missions (e.g. Stardust-Next) and instruments (e.g. M3) on non-NASA missions which are managed out of the Discovery office.  See https://planetarymissions.nasa.gov/missions/discovery

There was also a Mars Scout principal investigator lead program (Phoenix and MAVEN) about the same cost as Discovery.  LRO (Moon) was a human exploration mission that became a science mission, etc.

The final class of planetary missions are Flagship.  These are large and directed,  without a principal investigator, such as Cassini (Saturn), MSL (Mars), Mars 2020 (Mars), Europa Clipper (Europa), etc.

All of these missions are robotic. Unlike Kerbals, people generally insist on coming home.

 

Finally, don't forget that OSIRIS-REx (and Hayabusa2) approach their asteroids this summer.  The first science and good pictures will be in about a year.  Once we have a new shape map and color map of Bennu, I'll make a new challenge.

[Jasonden]

I have an entry for you.  This one's a bit different because, as you see by the dates on the imgur album, I flew this mission 2 years ago.

I'm the Deputy Principal Investigator of the Dragonfly NASA proposal, and while I and my colleagues were in the planning stages developing the mission, I ran a Kerbal version.  I've been obsessed with Kerbal Space program for many years now...  As you can see in the album, we hadn't yet decided on the final design for Dragonfly then.  So it's got 6 rotors and 6-fold symmetry instead of the rectangular box central design in the main image there.  

Album a/a0su7 will appear when post is submitted

This is also long before we settled on "Dragonfly" as the name for the mission, so it's just a Relocatable Lander.

Anyway, thought you guys might get a kick out of this!

- Jason W. Barnes
  Deputy Principal Investigator
  Dragonfly New Frontiers Proposal

Edited January 15, 2018 by Jasonden

[zeta function]

I did my mission, and ran into many problems. I had to just do a direct transfer to Saturn because I was 200 gigameters off (because Cape Canaveral is about a degree off the tropic of cancer), and I had to not run the kos script in the titan descent it caused immense lag, so I had to ditch the heat shield and aeroshell and land with just a chute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJr4CEaxNY

https://imgur.com/a/mA74k

the copter is a lttle heavier than the original 324kg, probally 370. It has siesmec things, cameras and other instuments. (Tweakscaled firespitter rotors). The rocket was a FH with two shuttle srbs as boosters. About 3000 tons. (Origionally it was just a 600 ton F9, but the direct transfer costs 3000 extra delta v, and the srbs are very heavy.) It qualifies for all but the ladt one in the quad copter catagory, so 200 points, plus 25 for aerobraking and 10 for a relay for a total of 235 points. The launch mass catagory should be different for going to titan, earths orbital speed is a little over 7700m/s.

Edited January 16, 2018 by zeta function

[Jetski]

On 1/14/2018 at 9:47 PM, Jasonden said:

I have an entry for you.  This one's a bit different because, as you see by the dates on the imgur album, I flew this mission 2 years ago.

I'm the Deputy Principal Investigator of the Dragonfly NASA proposal, and while I and my colleagues were in the planning stages developing the mission, I ran a Kerbal version.  I've been obsessed with Kerbal Space program for many years now...  As you can see in the album, we hadn't yet decided on the final design for Dragonfly then.  So it's got 6 rotors and 6-fold symmetry instead of the rectangular box central design in the main image there.  

Album a/a0su7 will appear when post is submitted

 

This is also long before we settled on "Dragonfly" as the name for the mission, so it's just a Relocatable Lander.

Anyway, thought you guys might get a kick out of this!

- Jason W. Barnes
  Deputy Principal Investigator
  Dragonfly New Frontiers Proposal

Yay! An official entry indeed.  I'm super excited you posted this here @Jasonden.  Cool mission!  If you get a chance to look through the entries so far, I would love to hear any suggestions you might have for improving realism, or if you have any links or resources we can use to make this challenge more realistic.  Thanks for taking the time to share with us!

 

@zeta function great job on our first RSS entry! I wasn't able to open the imgur album but I watched the video - looks like it stops at the Titan entry sequence. I'll go through the scoring as soon as I can, but for now congrats and get the first non-Laythe badge from the OP!

Edited January 16, 2018 by Jetski

[Kierra]

 

I imagined, according to the artists' views, what dragonfly might look like. Rotors made with Infernal Robotics and controlled via kOs. All the rotors can be controlled individually, which allows me to develop even today many autopilot functions, with the idea of making the craft completely autonomous if needed. 

I use :

 - RLA
- Restock / Restock +
- Tweakscale
- B9 Procedural Wings
- Infernal Robotics
- HullCam 

I also use KSRSS as planet pack, which is a stockalike version of RSS.

 

Currently, I still have a lot of autopilot functions to develop, but it is already able to go from point A to point B.

[Mopoii]

Glad this came back up ! I'll participate as soon as I get back from holiday