What potential signs of life could exist on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan? This is what NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly mission hopes to address as this rotorcraft recently advanced past its Critical Design Review (CDR), which is responsible for ensuring a spacecraft’s design and planned construction will result in the most optimal product for delivering impactful and efficient scientific data. Advancing past the CDR means construction of Dragonfly can begin, as it currently has a planned launch date of July 2028 for an approximate arrival at Titan in 2034.
“I’m so proud of what this team has accomplished in bringing this audacious mission to reality,” said Dr. Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, who is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and principal investigator of Dragonfly. “After years of design and testing, we are excited to start building Dragonfly itself and prepare for its game-changing voyage of exploration across an intriguing, mysterious ocean world.”
First proposed in April 2017 by APL, Dragonfly will be the first rotorcraft on an ocean world and the second rotorcraft on another planet, with the first being the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, which landed on the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover in February 2021. After landing on Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will use its suite of scientific instruments to obtain images and analyze samples of Titan’s surface with the goal of ascertaining the habitability potential of the large moon, which is the second largest moon in the solar system and larger than the planet Mercury.
The reason Titan is a target for astrobiology is due to its vast lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane, as Titan’s surface temperatures are so cold that these substances can exist in liquid form, as opposed to gaseous form on Earth. It is these lakes and seas combined with Titan’s hazy atmosphere that scientists hypothesize could exhibit the same conditions as early Earth when life first formed.
What will Dragonfly teach scientists about Titan in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Wikipedia
Featured Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben