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Record W4411850717 · doi:10.4050/f-0081-2025-0097

Dragonfly Preparation for Powered Flight Wind Tunnel and CFD Modeling

2025· article· en· W4411850717 on OpenAlex
Peter F. Lorber

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAdvanced Aircraft Design and Technologies
Canadian institutionsLockheed Martin (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWind tunnelDragonflyComputational fluid dynamicsMarine engineeringAerospace engineeringAerodynamicsAeronauticsEngineeringEnvironmental scienceComputer scienceGeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Preparation for Powered Flight (PPF) is a critical phase for Dragonfly, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. During PPF the descending Lander is lowered below the Backshell and uses its rotors to remove or “despin” any residual yaw motion of the vehicle. A 1/2-scale model of the Dragonfly PPF configuration was tested in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) 80 by 120-foot wind tunnel to measure aerodynamic loads and surface pressures on the Lander and Backshell. The results were used to improve understanding of the complex aerodynamic interactions and provide validation data for the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations used to develop the aerodynamic databases for full-scale, Titan conditions. Configurations tested in the wind tunnel included Lander-alone-no-rotors (L), Lander-alone-with-rotors (LR), and Lander-with-Rotors-and-Backshell (LRB). Both LR and LRB configurations were tested at multiple descent velocities and pitch and roll attitudes. The eight powered rotors were operated in nine combinations of active and inactive rotors, using steps of increasing RPM from idle to maximum. The results were used to identify conditions that generated the desired yaw moment for despin as well as those that generated reduced or opposite sign moment. In parallel, CFD simulations applied the STAR-CCM+ toolset to the experimental geometry. Time-averaged virtual disks represented the rotors by adding spatially varying axial and rotational momentum to the flow. There was generally good agreement between experiment and CFD, but conditions having strong interactions between the rotors, Lander, and Backshell were found to be improved by use of more sophisticated time accurate and discrete blade models. The lessons from the experiment are being applied to the CFD for the full-scale Lander under Titan conditions.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.673
Threshold uncertainty score0.223

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.262
Teacher spread0.250 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it