Full Breakdown
NASA Tests Heat Shield for Dragonfly at Sandia Facility
6/8/2026, 11:35:35 AM
Background
Dragonfly, a rotorcraft slated to explore Saturn’s moon Titan, requires a heat shield that can survive a two-hour atmospheric entry. The original ablative material, PICA-D, depended on a precursor no longer produced, forcing NASA engineers at Ames Research Center to reformulate the composite. The effort involves NASA’s Ames team, Sandia’s test facility, and Lockheed Martin, which will install the tiles.
Testing Campaign
Testing began in 2023 and continued for three years. Tiles were mounted on a 24-inch area atop Sandia’s 200-foot solar tower, where heliostats concentrated sunlight to generate temperatures above 4,500 °C, exceeding the predicted peak heat for Titan entry. Up to eight tests per visit were run, with inert gas flowing over the samples to simulate Titan’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Sandia’s facility is the only ground-based site in the western hemisphere that can reproduce flight-like thermal and mechanical stresses on a shield segment of this size.
NASA Position & Timeline
NASA selected Sandia because it is the sole U.S. test site that can apply the required heat flux to a shield segment large enough to generate flight-like stresses. The agency plans to launch Dragonfly in July 2028, with an expected arrival at Titan in late 2034. NASA describes Titan as having clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, and notes a subsurface ocean of liquid water.
Quotes
- “It’s really hard to make that material sustainable because there’s a lot of different ingredients that come from different sources, and if one of the companies goes out of business and they stop producing things, you’ve got to reformulate it.” — Milad Mahzari, NASA aerospace engineer, Ames Research Center
- “So the combination of those two things is what really worried us, and we wanted to be able to test that, and the only place we were able to test that is at Sandia.” — Milad Mahzari, NASA aerospace engineer, Ames Research Center
- “We did a lot of tests spanning about three years with NASA.” — Ken Armijo, Sandia lead engineer and test director
- “Ken (Armijo) and his team did a lot of good work with just pointing the heliostats because we were really pushing them to their limits.” — Milad Mahzari, NASA aerospace engineer, Ames Research Center
Impact
Demonstrating that the new ablative material can endure the predicted thermal and mechanical loads is essential for Dragonfly’s safe descent. Validation reduces risk for the mission’s unprecedented study of Titan’s hydrocarbon cycle and subsurface ocean.
Next Steps
The heat-shield tiles are complete, and Lockheed Martin will install them on the spacecraft in the coming months. After final integration, Dragonfly will undergo pre-launch processing ahead of its July 2028 launch, marking the next milestone toward its 2034 arrival at Titan.
