NASA Announces New Dragonfly Mission: a Drone to Explore Titan - The New York Times

NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style rotorcraft to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Dragonfly, as the mission is called, is capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements. The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. It is scheduled to launch in 2026.

BIG NEWS: The next @NASASolarSystem mission is… #Dragonfly – a rotorcraft lander mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan. This ocean world is the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere & we’re so excited to see what Dragonfly discovers: https://t.co/whePqbuGBq pic.twitter.com/BQdMhSZfgP
— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) June 27, 2019

“Titan is an incredibly unique opportunity scientifically,” said Elizabeth Turtle, who will lead the mission for the lab as its principal investigator, in an interview in April given before NASA’s announcement. “Not only is it an ocean world — an icy satellite with a water ocean in its interior — but it is the only satellite with an atmosphere. And the atmosphere at Titan has methane in it, which leads to all sorts of rich organic chemistry happening at even the upper reaches of the atmosphere.”

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Titan has long intrigued planetary scientists. On Christmas Day 2004, the spacecraft Cassini launched a probe, Huygens, to Titan’s surface, revealing a world analogous to a primordial Earth. Rather than water, however, Titan’s seas are filled with liquid methane.

Where a Mars rover is limited to inching forward over a decade or longer, for the Dragonfly team, Titan’s sky and the drone’s nuclear fuel source are the limit.

“We have the capacity, over the mission’s lifetime, to go hundreds of kilometers. One of the advantages we have is that we can always scout the next site. We can fly ahead, look at it, see what kind of terrain there is, and decide whether we want to go there or elsewhere,” says Dr. Turtle.

The spacecraft has been under consideration for two-and-a-half years in NASA’s class of science missions, called New Frontiers, which are supposed to cost less than $1 billion. The competition, held between multiple institutions in government and academia, is not unlike a “Shark Tank” for deep space exploration.

The competition’s other finalist was Caesar — the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return mission — which intended to collect a sample of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and return it to Earth for analysis. That comet was previously explored by Rosetta, a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency, until its mission ended in 2016.

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