With the success of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, NASA is advancing its plans to build more robotic aircraft to explore distant parts of the solar system. In the 2027, he sends a helicopter called Dragonfly to explore Titan, Saturn’s moon, in hopes of sniffing out signs of life there.
Now the Dragonfly science team has announced their mission goals – including finding chemical biosignatures on the moon that could indicate life. Titans are interesting place to find life because under the ice crust there is thought to be an ocean of liquid water. In addition to promoting the hunt for life beyond Earth, Dragonfly will also study the moon’s methane cycle and the complex chemistry of its atmosphere and surface.
“Titan stands for the utopia of an inventor” said Co-authored by Alex Hayes, Associate Professor of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and fellow Dragonfly researcher. “The scientific questions we have for Titan are very broad because we don’t know much about what’s really going on on the surface. For every question we answered while exploring Titan on the Cassini mission from Saturn’s orbit, we won 10 new questions.”
The last probe to visit Titan was the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, launched in 1997. While this mission was a remarkable achievement in terms of exploring Saturn and its rings and moons, we still don’t know much about the region. The Huygens probe entered Titan’s atmosphere in 2005 to take measurements, but no spacecraft had explored Titan’s surface before Dragonfly.
Titan’s weather system is very interesting, and like Earth, there are lakes, rivers, and rain, but these are made up of Methane as a substitute for water. It is possible that this methane could even harbor life that is chemically different from that on earth. To find out more, Dragonfly will land on Titan’s surface – aided by its dense atmosphere and low gravity which makes it ideal for aerial exploration.
“It is interesting to me that we have made predictions about what is happening at the surface at the local level and how titanium works as a system,” Hayes said, “and the images and measurements from Dragonfly will tell us how right or “they are wrong.”
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