NASA’s Dragonfly Mission to Explore Saturn’s Moon Titan Comes Into Sharper Focus

The scientific aims of the upcoming Dragonfly mission to discover Saturn’s moon Titan are described in a brand new analysis paper, together with the devices required to fulfill these targets.

With launch anticipated round 2027, Dragonfly ought to take to Titan’s skies sooner or later within the mid-2030s. By that time I’ll be in my mid-60s—a full-fledged senior citizen—however I’ll undoubtedly comply with the mission with child-like enthusiasm. For you see, Titan is my favourite place in area (outdoors of Earth, after all), owing to its many peculiar, enigmatic, and typically acquainted options. Also, as a devoted fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune sequence, I’ve all the time imagined Titan—with its oily floor—as resembling the fictional Harkonnen planet of Giedi Prime.

Titan is the one moon within the photo voltaic system to characteristic a dense ambiance and vital portions of liquid on the floor, even when that liquid takes the type of hydrocarbon seas and lakes. Gigantic sand dunes drape its tropical areas, the results of cosmic rays blasting the moon’s floor ice. Titan additionally includes a huge equatorial desert, known as the Shangri-La sand sea, which hosts the occasional mud storm. In that sense, the moon additionally resembles Arrakis from Dune (no phrase but if Titan hosts gigantic sand worms, or Harkonnens for that matter).

This is a perfect vacation spot for a robotic probe, as Titan is brimming with scientific targets. As a mission, Dragonfly has been a go since 2019, however the formal aims of the mission had been solely lately disclosed. Jason Barnes, deputy principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission and a professor of physics on the University of Idaho, is the primary writer of the brand new paper, printed within the Planetary Science Journal.

Dragonfly is a dual-quadrotor drone that may characteristic eight rotors, every measuring round 3.3 toes (1 meter) in size. With NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter at the moment buzzing round Mars, Dragonfly will turn out to be the second aerial car to fly on an alien world and the primary to take flight on an alien moon.

This received’t be the first-ever mission to Titan. NASA’s stationary Huygens probe landed there in 2005, capturing among the eeriest photos I’ve ever seen, and the Cassini probe, which circled Saturn for 13 years, used its radio capabilities to look via Titan’s thick cloud tops. But Dragonfly will take the scientific exploration of Titan to the following stage.

“Titan represents an explorer’s utopia,” Alex Hayes, affiliate professor of astronomy within the College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the brand new examine, mentioned in a statement. “The science questions we have for Titan are very broad because we don’t know much about what is actually going on at the surface yet. For every question we answered during the Cassini mission’s exploration of Titan from Saturn orbit, we gained 10 new ones.”

As the brand new paper factors out, Dragonfly will partake in what’s primarily however not completely an astrobiology mission. The aerial drone will seek for biosignatures (suggestive of earlier or present organic processes) and take measurements associated to the moon’s chemistry (together with the molecular constructing blocks required for all times) and the current potential for habitability.

Mission planners have chosen a touchdown web site close to Titan’s equator—a spot roughly 435 miles (700 km) north of the place Huygens landed. Dragonfly will discover the Shangri-La sand sea and probably even go to the Selk impact crater—a attainable cradle of life.

The mission will primarily happen throughout the northern hemisphere winter. The half-ton drone should not have any drawback reaching flight, as Titan’s gravity is one-seventh that of Earth’s, the winds are light, and the ambiance is thick sufficient to provide raise. Mission scientists aren’t anticipating that rain—consisting of liquid methane—might be an issue, however they’re not totally positive.

Dragonfly, a “rotorcraft relocatable lander,” within the phrases of the researchers, will spend most of its time on the bottom performing science and transmitting its information again to Earth. The aerial drone will solely fly for between half-hour and one hour as soon as each two Titan days, through which one Titan day is the same as 16 Earth days. The workforce will choose new locations on the fly, so to talk, in a fashion just like how goal locations are chosen for Martian rovers.

The drone’s payload will encompass eight scientific cameras, two spectrometers, and a drill to pattern for complicated organics. Dragonfly may also carry a geophysics and meteorological suite with 11 completely different devices able to measuring air temperature, air stress, wind pace and route, and humidity.

Where Cassini was capable of present grainy radio pictures from area, Dragonfly will do the bottom truthing wanted to verify or disprove theories in regards to the moon’s chemical processes and atmospheric floor interactions. The workforce may also examine the function of tropical deserts in Titan’s world methane cycle.

“My primary science interests are in understanding Titan as a complex Earth-like world and trying to understand the processes that are driving its evolution,” mentioned Hayes. “That involves everything from the methane cycle’s interactions with the surface and the atmosphere, to the routing of material throughout the surface and potential exchange with the interior.”

The seek for potential biosignatures will embody “life as we know it,” that’s, life that wants liquid water to outlive, and “life, but not as we know it,” resembling life able to find a house in Titan’s liquid hydrocarbons, in accordance with the paper.

Finding the methods through which Titan is just like Earth, or the methods through which a younger Earth might have resembled Titan, is clearly crucial, however I’m simply as taken with realizing all of the methods Titan is not like Earth. Come the 2030s, I’ll be looking out for the unique stuff, together with additional validation of Titan as essentially the most alien place within the photo voltaic system.

More: A methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan may very well be over 1,000 toes deep.