NASA to explore Saturn’s moon Titan with drone

NASA will explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan with a drone. The American space agency hopes to be able to study the atmosphere better there by being able to fly around the surface in addition to landing.

The mission consists of a lander named Dragonfly (“Dragonfly”). It lands around the equator of Saturn’s moon, and has to study the complex atmosphere there for a few years. Although it is a lander, Dragonfly uses a helicopter-like mechanism to fly a total of 180 kilometers of the total moon diameter of 5,149 kilometers on several flights. For this purpose, the Dragonfly has a thermoelectric generator on board that charges a battery using a plutonium-238 radioisotope. This option is chosen because Titan does not have enough solar power to charge the vehicle with solar cells.

Titan has an atmosphere 1.5 times the density of Earth, but its gravity is only fourteen percent that of our planet. Therefore, according to NASA, flying around with rotors is a perfect way to move over the celestial body. Onboard Dragonfly are instruments that NASA says are “very similar to those of the Curiosity rover,” currently on Mars. The probe will also take seismic measurements.

NASA announced the mission Thursday evening. For a long time, it was unclear exactly which mission the space agency would announce. There was also the option to fly to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and even bring a soil sample back to Earth. In the end, NASA chose the Titan mission, which is more difficult but can also be more profitable. “A great country is doing great things,” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said during the announcement. Part of the decision came in response to the findings of the Huygens probe. It was aboard the Cassini probe and descended in 2004 for a landing on Titan. There, the probe only survived for 90 minutes, but that provided a huge amount of data about the moon. For example, it became known that liquid substances can be found on the surface, such as lakes and rivers of liquid methane.

Dragonfly is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, a series of space missions designed to explore deep into the solar system. Dragonfly will be the fourth mission within New Frontiers, alongside New Horizons’ Pluto mission, the Juno probe, which flies near Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx at the asteroid Bennu.

It will be years before the Dragonfly arrives at Titan. The journey to the moon takes a very long time. The mission is expected to ascend on an unselected rocket in 2026, before landing on the moon in 2034. That’s as long as previous missions, such as Saturn’s probe Cassini, which took nearly seven years to travel the 1.2 billion kilometers. Cassini used a Jupiter gravitational pendulum to do this. It will also take a long time before it is even known whether the landing has been successful. Communication between Earth and Titan takes over 75 minutes.