Denver Business Journal By Greg Avery 6/27/2019
NASA is funding a mission that will send a drone-like quadcopter to explore a methane-soaked Saturn moon called Titan, and Jefferson County-based Lockheed Martin Space will engineer the systems to fly the spacecraft into Titan's atmosphere at high speed.
The space agency on Thursday afternoon announced it had selected the mission, dubbed Dragonfly and led by Johns Hopkins University researchers, from among two finalists competing for up to $850 million in funding.
The Dragonfly mission is slated to launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.
NASA called the project an “exciting and difficult mission†that will explore the celestial body in the solar system that most resembles what early Earth looked like.
Lockheed Martin Space (NYSE: LMT) will be a subcontractor on the mission, working with the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The aerospace company's work will draw on its 50 years of experience building entry systems for space probes that have landed on Mars or circled other planets in the solar system.
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