Dragonfly just flew its hardest flight to Titan — entirely inside a computer, and it nailed the landing

In 2034, NASA's Dragonfly — a car-sized, nuclear-powered flying robot — will drop out of the sky over Saturn's moon Titan, scan the dunes below, pick its own landing spot and touch down, with no pilot and no help from Earth. On October 23, the mission team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory ran that entire first flight in real time on flight-like computers: the separation, the terrain scan, the turn, the descent. It was the most complete rehearsal yet of a landing that has to work first time, more than a billion kilometres from anyone who could fix it. Dragonfly will spend years hopping across Titan's surface, sampling an alien world with seas of liquid methane.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation