CALIFORNIA, iNews.id – NASA forging ahead with his plans for more flying robotic spacecraft to explore distant parts of the Solar System. In 2027, the US space agency sent a helicopter called Dragonfly to explore Titan, Saturn’s moon.
Now, the Dragonfly science team has announced the goals of their mission, including searching the Moon for chemical biosignatures that could indicate life. Titan is an attractive location for searching for life because it is thought to have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust.
In addition to continuing the hunt for extraterrestrial life, Dragonfly will also investigate the moon’s methane cycle and the complex chemistry of its atmosphere and surface, as quoted from Digital Trends.
Co-author Alex Hayes, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and co-investigator of Dragonfly said Titan represents an explorer utopia. The scientific questions we have for Titan are broad because we don’t know much about what actually happens on the surface. For every question we answered during the Cassini mission to explore Titan from Saturn’s orbit, we got 10 new questions.
The last probe to visit Titan was the Cassini–Huygens ship, launched in 1997. While this mission was a remarkable success in terms of exploring Saturn and its rings and moons, there is still much we don’t know about the region.
Huygens’s research entered Titan’s atmosphere to do readings in 2005, but no aircraft had ever explored Titan’s surface before the Dragonfly.
Editor: Dini Listiyani
