NASA’s Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s Titan moon is more accurate

The scientific objectives of the upcoming Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s moon Titan are outlined in a new research paper, along with the instruments needed to completel these goals.

With a launch expected around 2027, Dragonfly is expected to take Titans heaven at some point in the mid-2030s. At this point I’ll be in my mid-60s – a full-fledged senior citizen – but I will undoubtedly follow the mission with childish enthusiasm. Because you see, Titan is my favorite place in space (outside of Earth, of course), due to its many peculiar, enigmatic and sometimes familiar features. Also, as a devoted Frank Herbert fan Dune series, I always imagined Titan – with its oily surface – as resembling the fictional planet Harkonnen from Giedi Prime.

Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere and significant amounts of liquid on the surface, even though this liquid takes the form of seas and lakes of hydrocarbons. Gigantic sand dunes drape its tropical regions, the result of cosmic rays projecting the moon’s surface ice. Titan also has a vast equatorial desert, called the Shangri-La Sand Sea, which occasionally hosts dust storm. In this sense, the moon also resembles Arrakis de Dune (no word yet if Titan harbors gigantic sand worms, or Harkonnens for that matter).

It is an ideal destination for a robotic probe, as Titan is full of scientific targets. As a mission, Dragonfly has been a to go since 2019, but the formal the mission’s objectives were only recently disclosed. Jason Barnes, deputy principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission and professor of physics at the University of Idaho, is the first author of the novel. paper, published in the Planetary Science Journal.

Dragonfly is a dual quadrotor drone that will feature eight rotors, each approximately 3.3 feet (1 meter) long. With NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter currently buzzing around Mars, Dragonfly will become the second aerial vehicle to fly on a foreign world and the first to take flight on an alien moon.

It won’t be the firstto look at mission on titan. NASA Stationary Huygens probe landed there in 2005, capturing part of the the strangest photos I have never seen it, and the Cassini probe, which circled Saturn for 13 years, used its radio capabilities to scan Titan’s thick clouds. Corn Dragonfly will take the scientific exploration of Titan to the next level.

“Titan represents an explorer’s utopia,” said Alex Hayes, associate professor of astronomy at the College of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the new study, in a declaration. “The scientific questions we have for Titan are very broad because we don’t yet know much about what is really happening on the surface. For every question we answered while exploring Titan by the Cassini mission from Saturn’s orbit, we won 10 new ones.

As the new document points out, Dragonfly will participate in what is primarily but not exclusively an astrobiology mission. The aerial drone will look for biosignatures (suggestive of past or current biological processes) and take measurements related to the chemistry of the moon (including the molecular building blocks necessary for life) and ccurrent potential for habitability.

Mission planners chose a landing site near Titan’s equator, about 700 km north of where Huygens landed. Dragonfly to explore Shangri-La Sand Sea and maybe even visit the Selk Impact Crater-a possible cradle of life.

The mission will take place mainly during the northern hemisphere winter. The half-ton drone should have no problem flying, as Titan’s gravity is one-seventh that of Earth, the winds are mild, and the atmosphere is thick enough to produce lift. Mission scientists don’t predict that rain, made up of liquid methane, will be a problem, but they’re not entirely sure.

Dragonfly, a “movable rotorcraft lander,” in the words of the researchers, will spend most of its time in the field doing science and transmitting its data to Earth. The aerial drone will only fly between 30 minutes and one hour once every two Titan days, where one Titan day equals 16 Earth days. The team will select new destinations on the fly, so to speak, in a manner similar to how target destinations are chosen for Martian rovers.

The drone’s payload will include eight science cameras, two spectrometers and a drill to sample complex organic materials. Dragonfly will also carry a geophysical and meteorological suite with 11 different instruments capable of measuring air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity.

Where Cassini was able to provide grainy radio images from space, Dragonfly will perform the ground verification necessary to confirm or deny theories about the moon’s chemical processes and interactions with the atmospheric surface. The team will also study the role of tropical deserts at Titan’s global methane cycle.

“My main scientific interests are to understand Titan as a complex Earth-like world and to try to understand the processes that govern its evolution,” said Hayes. “It involves everything from the interactions of the methane cycle with the surface and the atmosphere, to the routing of materials through the surface and potential exchanges with the interior.”

The search for potential biosignatures will include “life as we know it”, that is, life that needs liquid water to survive, and “life, but not as we know it”, as that life capable of finding a home in the liquid hydrocarbons of Titan. , according to the newspaper.

Finding out how Titan is similar to Earth, or how a young Earth may have looked like Titan, is obviously very important, but I’m just as interested in knowing all the ways that Titan is. not like the Earth. Come the 2030s, I’ll be on the lookout for exotic stuff, including further validation of Titan as the most alien place in the solar system.

Following: Sea of ​​methane on Saturn’s Titan moon could reach more than 300 meters deep.