​NASA May Decide This Year to Land a Drone on Saturn's Moon Titan

Titan is the only known body in the solar system with oceans on its surface (liquid methane). Knowledge of those Titan traits comes primarily from data gathered by the Cassini mission to the Saturn system and the Huygens probe that traveled with Cassini and touched down on Titan in 2005. Taken together, those two spacecraft completely reshaped scientists' ideas about the moon.

Scientists want to combine terrestrial drone technology and instruments honed by Mars exploration to investigate the complex chemical reactions taking place on Saturn's largest moon.

Last tuesday Meghan Bartels, a Senior Writer of Space.com, has told a Nasa's plans for Titan. The following extract is from an article.

🔸Scientists are working on a proposed mission called «Dragonfly.» Dragonfly, if chosen, would aim to launch in 2025 and arrive at Titan in 2034.

🔸On Earth, sunlight powers organic life growing in fields and forests; the same sunlight triggers chemical reactions in Titan's upper atmosphere that create large organic molecules that pour down on the moon's surface, like Earth's rainwater.

🔸Cassini never got a good view of the surface through the Saturn moon's thick atmosphere. If all goes smoothly, Dragonfly would be able to explore dozens of sites over the course of two Earth years.

🔸According to Melissa Trainer, a Research Space Scientist in the Planetary Environments Laboratory at NASA , «landing on Titan takes something like over 2 hours because of dense atmosphere.»

🔸With its rotor-copter design, Dragonfly can lift itself off the surface and fly away using the nuclear power source that NASA had available for this class of mission.

🔸That science will tackle the chemistry on Titan. Scientists know that the moon hosts huge amounts of organic compounds, but Cassini and Huygens didn't gather enough data to clarify the details of the planet's chemistry.

🔸Dragonfly would be able to identify precise organic compounds, so scientists could determine just how close Titan's molecules are to those that terrestrial biology relies on.

💬 Best Comment on Reddit

Randomtask: «A submarine on Titan or Enceladus has been the ultimate dream of planetary scientists ever since Voyager discovered that those moons had lakes 40 years ago. Proposals come and go, but one of these days the technology and the cost are going to hit the sweet spot, and it’s going to happen. Couldn’t be more excited for seeing it come to fruition sometime in the coming decades.»

🎑 What is shown in the photo?

An artist's depiction shows each stage of the proposed Dragonfly mission, including landing on Titan's surface, doing science in place and relocating to a new work site.