It’s official. NASA will send a pioneer spacecraft to Titan, the largest moon on the planet Saturn. The mission, called Dragonfly, will explore the mysterious world using pioneering drone technology. And it will look for the “building blocks of life”, allowing us to see how life began on Earth.
Titan has all the ingredients for life, and the Dragonfly mission could find evidence of aliens in the distant world, NASA scientist Lori Glaze said.
Saturn’s moon is quite similar to Earth , with rivers and mountains that look like desert areas on our own planet. NASA stressed that the images sent by the Dragonfly when it flies over the surface can remind us of snapshots taken from an airplane flying over Earth. But it also has spectacular differences. Titan has methane clouds and rain, and organic material forms in the atmosphere and falls on the world like snow.
The Dragonfly spaceship is capable of landing in this world and then jumping back like a drone, flying over the surface before landing on other parts of Titan that may be of interest. It will be the first time that NASA has launched such a vehicle that can fly like a large drone.
It can do this because Titan’s dense atmosphere is four times thicker than Earth’s, allowing it to move easily across its diameter. The flying vehicle is the size of a Martian rover.
“Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science at the agency’s Washington headquarters.
“ It’s amazing to think of this drone flying for miles and 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 could teach us about the origin of life itself. “
The mission will not launch in 2026 and it will take eight years to reach Titan, finally landing in 2034. The spacecraft will parachute and land over the equatorial region.
When it gets there, it will bounce around dozens of different places on Titan, searching for chemical processes that mirror those that were present on early Earth. In doing so, you will hope to discover how chemistry became biology, allowing life to begin and leading to the variety of living things that surround us today.
He is expected to find those clues as he traverses the organic dunes and floor of an impact crater where scientists believe there are liquid water and complex organic materials. Those ingredients may have been together for tens of thousands of years,allowing us to glimpse unprecedented the beginnings of life.
You will also have tools to look for indications of life in the past, or even now, as the vehicle will be equipped with drills and probes to investigate the surface, as well as cameras to capture images of the Saturnian moon. It will also feature a neutron-activated gamma ray spectrometer that would quickly identify the elemental composition by mass at landing sites. Previous versions of this instrument have required active cryocoolers, but this will not pose a problem because the temperature of Titan’s atmosphere is low enough.
“With the Dragonfly mission, NASA will once again do what no one else can do,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.“Visiting this mysterious ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe.This state-of-the-art mission would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but now we are ready for the incredible Dragonfly flight. “
The Dragonfly mission is part of NASA’s competitive New Frontiers Program and tops another possible project to collect samples from a nearby comet.
Previous missions that were part of the same program included the New Horizons mission to Pluto and then the Kuiper Belt, the Juno probe that flew to Jupiter, and the Osiris-Rex mission that landed on the asteroid Bennu and will return to Earth.
“The New Frontiers program has transformed our understanding of the solar system, uncovering the internal structure and composition of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, the icy secrets of Pluto’s landscape, revealing mysterious objects in the Kuiper belt, and exploring an asteroid near the Earth for the building blocks of life, “said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
“Now we can add Titan to the list of enigmatic worlds that NASA will explore.”
Reference: NASA
