How Dragonfly will explore Saturn’s ‘bizarro Earth’ moon, Titan
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Search for life
Life on Titan, if it exists or ever existed, would need to adapt to a life of Antarctic-like temperatures, near-constant twilight, and transient liquid water. What sort of life could possibly survive in such a hostile environment?
That’s exactly what Dragonfly aims to investigate by flying to Selk Crater, a geologically young impact crater just 800 kilometers (about 500 miles) north of where Cassini’s Huygens probe landed in 2005. As Dragonfly approaches the crater, passing over the saw-toothed dunes of the Belet field, its panoramic cameras will capture a scene that is eerily Earth-like. The raised icy rim, scalloped by millennia of erosion from the windblown sand nearby, encircles a 90 kilometer-wide (about 56 mile-wide) bowl in the icy crust. In every direction, river channels carve their way through Selk’s ejecta blanket, a layer of ice excavated during the crater’s formation when an impactor punched through Titan’s icy crust.
Descending towards the crater’s center, Dragonfly will hover over terraced cliffs sloping sharply down towards the central peak — a mini-mountain that spans nearly half of Selk’s 60 kilometer-wide (about 37 mile-wide) crater floor. After landing on the crater floor, Dragonfly will discover a confluence of all the different materials Titan has to offer — windblown organics from the Belet field, liquid hydrocarbons from the river channels, and water ice, refrozen after melting from impact heating.
Selk’s crater floor might have held a warm, wet pond when it formed and for a few hundred (or thousand) years after. Once Dragonfly arrives at Selk, scientists can use Dragonfly’s suite of instruments to search for prebiotic molecules — the building blocks of life as we know it — and determine how, or if, biomolecules are formed on Titan. By examining prebiotic chemistry on Titan, scientists will gain a better understanding of how biomolecules formed on early Earth, leading to advances in the study of life and how it arose.
Looking ahead
We’ll have to wait until 2037 for Dragonfly to land on Titan, but in the meantime, NASA scientists are hard at work investigating how aerial missions might look in the future. Ingenuity, the world’s most adorable scouting helicopter, successfully completed its technology demonstration and has flown several times at Mars’ Jezero Crater. Each hop, skip and jump brings us one step closer to Dragonfly’s debut.
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