Chasing Life On Saturn's Moon: NASA's Dragonfly Mission To Titan
Released as its latest mission, NASA’s Dragonfly aims to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Derived from the New Frontiers program, the mission will see a drone like a rotorcraft exploring a multitude of promising locations across the topography. Following a 2026 launch, Dragonfly will arrive in 2034 and will eventually travel 108 miles around Titan with the intention of furthering the Cassini mission. In September 2017, Cassini intentionally plunged itself into Saturn’s atmosphere marking the end of a 13-year mission.
Upon its initial arrival, Dragonfly will ground at the “Shangri-La” dune fields, surveying and taking samples within a 5-mile radius of the linear dunes. Believed by NASA to show evidence of past liquid water, the Selk impact crater is the next stop in Dragonfly’s mission where NASA scientists believe the important ingredients for life combined with something that hit Titan in the past, possibly tens of thousands of years ago, may exist. According to NASA “there is evidence of past liquid water, organics – the complex molecules that contain carbon, combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen – and energy, which together make up the recipe for life.”
Titan has long been an open question and topic of research and scientific assessment, driving the potential of hosting extraterrestrial life. Larger than Mercury, Titan’s atmosphere rains and snows, has surface features like lakes and oceans but of methane and ethane, and underground liquid oceans. With an atmospheric pressure 60% greater than that of Earth and surface temperatures of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s believed Titan may not be much different than that of primordial Earth. Non-existent to Earth, NASA scientists are hoping the Dragonfly mission will return valuable data on the strange minerals exclusive to Titan. Suspected to form rings around Titan’s lakes, these minerals include co-crystals made up of acetylene and butane. However, while acetylene and butane are present on Earth, they are solid on Titan.
Given its complex chemistry, it's safe to assume that Titan is not hospitable to humans, but remains attractive to researchers and further study.
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