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Reprinted with permission of AmericaSpace.
It was a long-awaited announcement, but the winner of NASA's next selection of missions in New Frontiers is … Dragonfly! This ambitious mission will be the first return to Titan, Saturn's moon, from Cassini / Huygens, and this drone-like gyroplane will fly to various places in Titan to search for clues about the origins of life, or even evidence of life itself. extraterrestrial yet remarkably similar to the Moon.
Instead of a rover like Mars, NASA chose a drone-like design for Dragonfly. He will be able to go to different places and take samples of sands rich in organic matter for analysis. The atmosphere of Titan being four times denser than that of the Earth, it is indeed easier to fly on Titan than on Earth. Dragonfly will be the first of these rotorcraft to explore another world. NASA's director Jim Bridenstine said:
With the Dragonfly mission, NASA will do what no one else can do. Visiting this mysterious oceanic world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe. This high-tech mission would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but we are now ready for Dragonfly's extraordinary flight.
We are sending a spaceship to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn! #Dragonfly is a bi-quadricopter and will be able to travel miles and miles across Titan's surface, landing at various locations for scientific research. Congratulations to the @JHUAPL team, we are all very excited! https://t.co/ChyYRDvOXF pic.twitter.com/7SjrVOPCjW
– Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 27, 2019
It's an exciting mission, but it will take time to get to Titan. Dragonfly will be launched in 2026 and will arrive in 2034. The Saturn system is far away from the Earth, 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun (about 10 times more than the Earth).
Titan is one of the most fascinating and exotic worlds in our solar system, a moon larger than Mercury with its rains, rivers, lakes and oceans. But it's also very cold – around -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius) – and Titan's water is methane / liquid ethane. Yet the landscape of rivers and shores is strangely similar to the Earth.
Titan also has extensive sand dunes composed of hydrocarbons – organic matter – that cover the surface. Titan's thick nitrogen atmosphere is filled with an organic smog that obscures the surface of the view from the orbit. In addition to rain, other organic matter falls to the surface, like snow. Titan is rich in these organic substances, and scientists believe that it looks like what the early Earth looked like and that its prebiotic chemistry is similar to the one that led to life on our planet.
It is even now thought that there is on Titan an ocean of groundwater, similar to moons such as Europa, Enceladus and Ganymede, among others.
Dragonfly artist concept marking on the surface of Titan. Image via NASA / JHU-APL.
Titan, as NASA's Cassini probe radar images show, is a complex world with methane / ethane rains, rivers, lakes and seas. Could he endure any life? Image via NASA / JPL.
Thomas Zurbuchen is NASA's Deputy Administrator for Science at the agency's headquarters in Washington. He said:
Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system and Dragonfly is unlike any other mission. It is remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles through the organic sand dunes of Saturn's largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment. Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and that could teach us about the origin of life itself.
With liquids on the surface and underneath, as well as many organic materials, some scientists even think that there could be a primitive life form on Titan right now, despite the harsh cold.
NASA's last visit to Titan dates back to 2005, when the Huygens spacecraft, part of the Cassini mission, landed successfully on what appeared to be a dry riverbed strewn with rocks and ice blocks. very hard water.
The Dragonfly mission has a lot of scientific and other data to help it succeed – it's a 13-year Cassini mission to Saturn, which ended in late 2017. It will enjoy a calm time to land and find a first secure landing. site and scout targets scientifically interesting.
The surface of Titan as it was first seen by the Huygens probe on January 14, 2005. The "rocks" are actually rounded blocks of solid ice. Image via ESA / NASA / JPL / University of Arizona.
It will first land in the equatorial dunes of Shangri-La, which resemble the linear dunes of Namibia in southern Africa. Dragonfly will explore this region with short flights, creating a series of longer "skipped" flights of up to eight kilometers. It will stop along the way to take samples in geographically diverse areas. It will later reach the Selk crater, where there are traces of liquid water, organic matter and energy, which is the recipe for life. The dragonfly will fly more than 175 km, nearly double the distance traveled to date by all Martian rovers.
Dragonfly was one of two finalists for the upcoming New Frontiers mission, the other being a new comet return mission called "Return of Comet Astrobiology Exploration Samples" (CAESAR). Unfortunately, because of the budget, only one of the two missions could be chosen, and this time it was Dragonfly. Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Global Science Division, said:
The New Frontiers program transformed our understanding of the solar system by uncovering the internal structure and composition of Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere, uncovering the arcane secrets of Pluto's landscape, revealing mysterious objects in the Kuiper Belt, and by exploring an asteroid close to the Earth for the building. blocks of life. We can now add Titan to the list of enigmatic worlds that NASA will explore.
The dragonfly mission will be an exciting one in the exploration of the external solar system. By studying Titan's prebiotic chemistry, he could not only look for clues about the origin of life on Earth, but could also prove that life itself existed – or still exists – in this world strangely similar to the Earth, but still totally foreign.
Conclusion: scheduled for 2026, the dragonfly should arrive at Titan in 2034. It will look for clues about the origins of life, or even evidence of life itself, on the largest moon of Saturn.
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