“The pictures from Huygens made Titan alive as a place,” says Ralph Lorenz, an APL planetary scientist who was a member of the Cassini radar team and is Dragonfly’s mission architect. During the 72 minutes it spent on the ground before its batteries expired, Huygens revealed that its landing site was a damp stream bed, largely composed of water ice, filled with rocks and pebbles. The slow descent allowed Huygens plenty of time to photograph the approaching surface before it landed, hitting with the same energy as if dropped from an Earth height of about three feet. Equipped with a microphone, Huygens also recorded the first sounds ever heard from another body in our solar system.
Taking advantage of Titan’s thick atmosphere, Huygens descended via parachute for two and a half hours, measuring atmospheric pressure, temperatures, electrical properties, humidity, wind directions, and speed. In 2005, the Huygens lander became the first spacecraft to land on a body in the outer solar system. During periodic passes, Cassini photographed cloud movements in Titan’s atmosphere and used radar to peer beneath its haze to map the rich detail on its surface.Ĭassini also deployed a lander-named Huygens after the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered the moon in 1655. It drives photochemistry in the atmosphere by breaking down the methane, and the methane recombines to make exceedingly complex carbon molecules.”Ĭassini’s radar and its Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, working in infrared light, finally lifted Titan’s vast veil. “Titan has all the same ingredients that early Earth would have had,” Turtle continues. “We can’t really study that on Earth because biology is everywhere, and it has overprinted its own origins,” she says. Turtle says this complex chemistry is a key to solving one of science’s biggest mysteries: How chemistry developed into biology. Cassini’s analysis led to the belief that methane and ethane rain falls on Titan’s surface from clouds of chemicals in its sky. NASA’s spectacular Cassini mission to Saturn, which spent 13 years exploring the gas giant and its 82 moons, measured the ingredients of Titan’s atmosphere, and found that it included organic compounds. She also worked on Cassini’s imaging and radar teams.įor decades, Titan’s thick, orange-peach haze vexed astronomers who longed for a peek at the moon’s surface, but in that smog is a soup of prebiotic molecules that makes Titan all the more fascinating for study. Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle of the John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab is Dragonfly’s principal investigator. Dragonfly will cover that distance in minutes.ĭr. The current otherworldly distance champion is the Mars rover Opportunity, which slinks along at an average of two miles per Earth-year.
At the end of each of its four arms, two 53-inch counter-rotating rotors, one atop the other, will provide lift.įlying will give Dragonfly a level of mobility unmatched by any lander or rover ever built. Describing it as a “relocatable lander,” Dragonfly’s designers are relying on eight rotors in a quadcopter arrangement. Instead of resting on wheels, it will land on skids like a helicopter.
“But on Titan we can take advantage of the atmosphere to fly from place to place rather than driving.”ĭragonfly, expected to weigh around 1,200 pounds, will be the size of the largest Mars rovers. “We’ve seen in the exploration of Mars how much mobility enhances the science return and what you can learn by going from place to place,” she says. “The idea of flying on another planet is really exciting,” says Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission and a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The team is creating the Dragonfly mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, to investigate Titan with instruments carried not by wheels but propellers. It will enable them to explore a much larger area on Titan than rovers ever have done on Mars. A team of Titan watchers sees opportunity in that dense atmosphere. It’s on Saturn’s moon Titan, a mysterious world hidden by a methane-rich atmosphere four times denser than Earth’s. The friendliest place to fly in this solar system isn’t here on Mother Earth.
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