New data from the Cassini spacecraft predicts that NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s giant moon would land on a landscape with dunes and frozen bedrock. But there’s more than meets the eye!
Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, will soon be finally explored so that scientists will be able to find out more about it for the first time.
Check out below the first details about Dragonfly’s daring mission.
Exploring Saturn’s Moon Titan: What to Expect?
Dragonfly, a rotorcraft that will take off in 2027 and arrive in 2034, will fly over Titan and conduct aerial exploration. According to NASA, Dragonfly will have a range far larger than that of a wheeled rover, with each 30-minute flight allowing it to travel around 16km (10 miles).
But that’s not all.
Dragonfly will investigate a region with a width of hundreds of miles or kilometers during its two-year mission. It’ll also have to soft-land on Titan under a parachute (how cool, right?!), on frozen ground obscured from plain view by the thick hydrocarbon fog covering the moon’s atmosphere, before it can take to the skies on its own. Quite impressive, isn’t it?!
Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan. It rains liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth where you have dunes, some little mountains, and an impact crater, said planetary scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell University.
The Shangri-La dune area, next to the 50-mile-wide (80km) crater Selk, will be the location of Dragonfly’s landing. Between 2004 and 2017, the NASA Cassini probe visited Saturn and captured images of this area, so it’s not an entirely new region.
In fact, Selk is such a fascinating place! It’s of a geological age of about a few hundred million years; the impact that cut it out would have melted the surrounding ice, causing interactions between the organic molecules in the hydrocarbon soup on Titan’s surface and the fresh liquid water.
More details about Dragonfly’s mission should be available soon!