Where a Mars rover is limited to inching forward over a decade or longer, however, for the Dragonfly team, Titan’s sky and the drone’s nuclear fuel source are the limit. Turtle.ĭragonfly is similar in size to a Mars rover, or about the size of a large lawn mower. We are just applying technology already developed for other things to a new problem,” says Dr. “One of the things great about Dragonfly is that we are not inventing anything. That’s why we want to send a lander there,” said Dr. “We have all these ingredients necessary for life as we know it, and they’re just sitting there doing chemistry experiments on the surface of Titan. Sunlight, at the same time, drives the moon’s photochemistry, introducing energy to a system primed for life. If cryovolcanoes erupt on Titan’s surface, as data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests, the organic material can mix with liquid water. Complex organic molecules fall from its atmosphere onto the surface of Titan, gather over long periods of time and can be processed further. That might include the things that wiggle. He predicted that features of Titan will be, “recognizable, but different in flavor from what you see on Earth and Mars.” Ralph Lorenz of Applied Physics Laboratory, the Dragonfly project scientist in an April interview. “There’s going to be a tremendous change in the fabric of how we see Titan as a world,” said Dr. It has methane clouds, methane rain and methane lakes and seas on the surface. Its methane cycle is analogous to Earth’s water cycle. Methane on Titan plays the role that water plays here. The surface pressure of Titan is one-and-a-half times the surface pressure of Earth, and the same sorts of interactions between air, land and sea take place. Chemically, it is very much like our world’s primordial past. And the atmosphere at Titan has methane in it, which leads to all sorts of rich organic chemistry happening at even the upper reaches of the atmosphere.”īecause of the nature of its atmosphere, Titan is a very Earthlike place. “Not only is it an ocean world - an icy satellite with a water ocean in its interior - but it is the only satellite with an atmosphere. Turtle said in an interview in April before NASA’s announcement. “Titan is an incredibly unique opportunity scientifically,” Dr. Drills in the landing skids will collect samples of the Titan surface for onboard analysis. In addition to a camera, Dragonfly will carry an assortment of scientific instruments: spectrometers to study Titan’s composition a suite of meteorology sensors and even a seismometer to detect titanquakes when it lands on the ground. Turtle described it as, “eerily familiar on such a different and exotic world.” Rather than water, Titan’s seas are filled with liquid methane. It landed in one piece, revealing a world analogous to a primordial Earth - Dr. On Christmas Day 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent a probe, Huygens, to the moon’s surface. Titan has long intrigued planetary scientists.
“We will take images with both downward-looking cameras along the ground track underneath Dragonfly as we fly over the surface, as well as forward-looking cameras, so we’ll be able to look out toward the horizon as well.” “We will be flying initially over dunes and then into rugged terrain,” said Elizabeth Turtle, who will lead the mission for the lab as its principal investigator. Cameras on Dragonfly will stream images during flight, offering people on Earth a bird’s-eye view of the Saturn moon. Once at Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2026. “This revolutionary mission would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” said Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, in a video statement announcing the mission. The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.ĭragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements, studying the world’s mysterious atmosphere and topography while searching for hints of life on the only world other than Earth in our solar system with standing liquid on its surface.
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