Saturn’s largest moon, which is also larger than Mercury, the solar system’s 2nd largest
moon after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and home to Marvel’s super villain; Thanos.
Yes, we are talking today about the moon Titan and an exciting future opportunity to explore
it by NASA’s new mission: “Dragonfly”!
A pretty catchy name for a space mission if you ask me.
However, “Dragonfly” will not be the first mission to land on Titan, back in the year
2005, the “Cassini” Space mission landed the “Huygens” probe on the moon.
The probe measured some parameters about Titan’s wind and atmosphere.
For the “Dragonfly” mission, let’s start with why Titan?
What drew NASA to explore it in the first place?
Other than probably a public request from Marvel’s fans!
Titan has many qualities that make it worth exploring:
First of all, it has a dense enough atmosphere to allow for life on it, actually, Titan is
the only moon with a dense atmosphere in the whole of our solar system.
An added bonus is that its atmosphere is rich in nitrogen like Earth, exactly 95% nitrogen,
and 5% methane.
And second of all, Titan is a liquid rich moon, so liquid rich in fact that it has methane
seas and rivers and lakes on its surface.
And so far, it’s the only extraterrestrial object known to have such vast bodies of liquid.
Not only that, but Titan also supports a hydrological cycle; it has clouds and rains and seas of
liquid organic material like methane and ethane.
And finally, Titan is the perfect environment to study the pre-life chemical interactions
that similarly took place on Earth and the possibility of habitation outside of our planet,
and that’s because the moon has a lot of diverse organic material found on its surface.
On the other hand, NASA has a mission called “Ocean Worlds”, its theme is to explore
different interplanetary objects with vast bodies of water inside and outside our solar
system, and guess who’s on the list?
Yes, it’s our buddy Titan!
Because besides having a crust of water ice on its surface, Titan also has a subsurface
water ocean as well.
All these reasons are factors that participated in the decision to engineer and design a special
mission to explore Titan.
And thus, the “Dragonfly” mission was chosen as part of NASA’s “New Frontiers”
program that aims at launching missions to high priority worlds within our solar system.
The program also included some famous previous missions like the “New Horizons” mission
back in 2006 to Pluto, the “Juno” mission back in 2011 to Jupiter, the “OSIRIS-REx”
mission back in 2016 to the asteroid Bennu, and ending with “Dragonfly” to Titan.
The “Dragonfly” mission won against another mission called “CAESAR” which was set
to explore the comet “Churyumov–Gerasimenko” and return samples from it to Earth.
Before talking about the “Dragonfly”, we must not forget the efforts of past space
missions in giving us an overview of the moon Titan.
Our first sight of Titan came from the two NASA “Voyager” spacecrafts that flew past
Titan back in 1979 and 1980.
Followed in the year 1994 by photographs taken with the help of the “Hubble Space Telescope.”
But only thanks to 13 years of studying Saturn and its moons by the space mission “Cassini”,
that scientists are now able to choose an initial landing site for “Dragonfly” and
possible areas of interest for exploration.
“Cassini” takes the credit as well for the most detailed pictures we have of Titan.
Now, more about the star of the video and less about the past!
“Dragonfly” is a medium-class planetary science mission that costs 850 million US
dollars to develop, and that’s excluding launch expenses and mission operation!
Crazy, right!
So such an expensive mission must have some powerful goals in mind to achieve.
In a broad sense, “Dragonfly” will be concerned -among other things- with astrobiology
which is the field of study of the origin and evolution of life in the universe, and
especially on Titan in the case of “Dragonfly.”
But before we talk about the goals, let’s take a look at the “Dragonfly” itself
and what the spacecraft looks like.
Designing a mission to Titan is not a trivial task, because the moon has a freezing cold
temperature of -178.889 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit), but we really can’t
blame Titan for being “too cool” when it’s 10 times farther from the Sun than
the Earth is, at a distance of 1.4 billion kilometers (886 million miles.)
Due to this unimaginable cold, the body of the “Dragonfly” along with the science
equipment onboard and the important electronics must be specially fabricated in order to withstand
the low temperature and function properly.
Another huge challenge in designing a spacecraft to be fully operational on Titan is, “How
the hell are we gonna power it?” and that’s an awesome question since most spacecrafts
rely on the Sun to charge solar arrays which in turn power the spacecraft, but Titan has
a dense atmosphere that doesn’t really allow for much sunlight to pass through.
So how are we really gonna power the “Dragonfly”?
Scientists faced this dilemma before with long term space missions like the “Voyager”
and the “New Horizons” missions where the spacecrafts went far and beyond being
powered by sunlight.
And the solution in these situations is a “Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric
Generator” or an (MMRTG) for short.
The (MMRTG) is a nuclear power source that transforms heat from nuclear fusion into small
amounts of power, stored in lithium-ion batteries.
The (MMRTG) consists of two components: a radioisotope material, and a converter to
convert heat into energy.
And just like that, the “Dragonfly” can function on Titan without ever needing sunlight.
Now, let’s talk about the structure of the “Dragonfly” which is very unique and unlike
any other past spacecraft.
The “Dragonfly” is a rotorcraft with eight blades which is sometimes called an “Octocopter”,
and it’s designed for multiple flying and landings on Titan just like a drone, making
it the first ever space mission to fly on a planetary body.
Neat ha!
The nature of Dragonfly’s stay on Titan will be a mixture of flying for 30 minutes
then landing then flying again, and so on and so forth, that’s a technique called
“Leapfrog” flights or “hopping” and it’s used to help scientists explore vast
areas on Titan in a small amount of time.
The “Dragonfly” will perform one “hop” for each Titan day, which is the equivalent
of 16 Earth days.
The “Leapfrog” flight is so convenient for Titan’s environment because the moon’s
atmosphere is so dense and its gravity is only one seventh that of the Earth, which
means that flying and hopping around is much easier.
The body of the octocopter is designed and developed by engineers in Penn State university
in America, making sure it can operate in Titan’s harsh environment as well as repeatedly
fly and land safely on the moon.
Now, let’s get back to the mission’s goals.
In fact, “Dragonfly” is gonna make Titan’s fans so proud by performing some hardcore
science both on ground and during flight.
Let’s start with on ground science:
As we said, the “Dragonfly” mission will be focused on areas of astrobiology, so one
of the biggest scientific goals of the missions is to search for and identify chemical traces
that may be linked to past biological lives on Titan.
And that’s to draw conclusions on whether the moon was ever inhabited or not.
Second and third goals have to do with the surface of Titan: imaging it, characterizing
its components, and studying its geological features.
And that’s because we don’t have enough in-depth data about the moon’s surface.
And just as it’s important to study the surface of Titan, it’s also as important
to dig deep under it, and here comes the final goal of the mission that aims at looking at
the subsurface and seismic activities of Titan.
In-flight goals on the other hand includes: Creating a map and a profile of the atmosphere
on Titan.
Taking aerial images of the moon’s surface.
Scouting for different landing sites and areas of interest.
And finally, studying the geology of Titan from a higher point of view.
To achieve these scientific goals, “Dragonfly” will carry a variety of scientific equipment
made specially for the mission:
Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer: or “DraMS” for short, this mass spectrometer is going
to study chemical material and identify components relevant to life as well as non carbon-based
molecules.
Dragonfly gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer: or “DraGNS” for short is another spectrometer
that will be used to analyse surface composition with the help of gamma rays.
Dragonfly geophysical and meteorological sensors: or “DraGMet” for short.
These sensors are yet to be determined by the mission’s team, but they will basically
be a suite of equipment able to measure different geological parameters on Titan’s surface
and subsurface to better understand the nature of subsurface oceans and to measure Titanquakes.
DragonCam: a variety of onboard cameras in order for “Dragonfly” to be able to navigate
on Titan’s surface and scout for safe landing spots while it “hops” on the moon.
The cameras will also be used to photograph the topography of Titan and its geological
features.
More information about the scientific equipment and their technical specs will be revealed
in the future as NASA announced that the equipment will be developed over the course of three
years by the mission’s team.
Afterwhich, the building process of the “Dragonfly” itself along with its suite of equipment will
last for another three years.
The team that’s going to develop the “Dragonfly” and its equipment is led by the “Applied
Physics Laboratory” in John Hopkins University in America.
And that’s in collaboration with NASA engineers across different NASA centers and laboratories
like the “Goddard Space Flight Center” and the “Jet Propulsion Laboratory”, among
others.
As well as an international collaboration from the “Japanese Aerospace Exploration
Agency” (JAXA.)
The “Dragonfly” is expected to launch in 2026, but the mission team still hasn’t
picked a launch vehicle yet.
That decision will be made in collaboration with NASA based on the final weight of the
spacecraft and the different capabilities of launch vehicles, among other factors.
Once the “Dragonfly” is launched, it will reach Titan 8 years later in 2034.
Communications between “Dragonfly” and Earth will be performed by NASA’s “Deep
Space Network” with a delay around 70 to 90 minutes.
Data gathered by “Dragonfly” will be sent back to Earth during Titan’s day time which
is equivalent to 8 Earth days, while it works on performing the science at night.
If for any unfortunate reason the mission did not launch in the predetermined date,
another launch window will be available a year later.
The “Dragonfly” mission will stay on Titan performing science for 32 months, subject
to renewal.
If you liked all the fancy talk about “Dragonfly” and want to be part of the science it will
be able to perform once on Titan, you too can participate in the fun and join the “Dragonfly”
team of scientists.
The “Dragonfly” mission opens opportunities for graduate students and early career investigators
to join the team in a 2 year fully funded program that even covers travel expenses!
The program includes different projects related to Dragonfly’s scientific goals and instruments.
This opportunity is open annually for up to 3 students from US universities, for this
year, the deadline is July 29th and you can apply through the link in the description.
Good luck to the “Dragonfly” mission team, we hope them all the luck in the 6 years to
come until the launch.