Today, NASA announced the next mission in their New Frontiers program to explore the solar system. Dragonfly, a drone lander, will explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
Titan is the only solar system moon with an extensive atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. The moon is also filled with organic materials, and is thought to be similar to what early Earth might have looked like, before life formed, but with many of the same ingredients. Despite being a distant moon, it often ranks as one of the most Earth-like worlds in the solar system.
Dragonfly, which will launch in 2026 and land on Titan in 2034, is being managed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. It will be able to make multiple autonomous flights, up to a few dozen, powered by its rotors across Titan’s surface. In total, it will spend about two and a half years exploring Titan’s geology and chemistry. This includes flying over one hundred miles and searching for the possibility of life, in the past or even in the present day.
The Spacecraft
Dragonfly weighs nearly a thousand pounds, and is roughly the size of a dune buggy. Thanks to the thick cover of Titan’s atmosphere and its distance from the sun, Dragonfly can’t rely on solar power, and will instead carry a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), a nuclear power source like the one the Curiosity rover uses on Mars.
Dragonfly will carry multiple cameras to take pictures on its journey, both from a distance and up close when it lands, to get a zoomed-in image of the material it studies. It also carries a mass spectrometer, allowing it to analyze in detail the materials it encounters across Titan’s surface and determine their chemical makeup. It can perform meteorological studies as it cruises Titan’s atmosphere, and seismic studies to examine Titan’s underground.