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NASA has today announced that they’ve greenlit a project that intends to send a robot flying over the dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
Considered the most Earth-like moon in our solar system, those spearheading the ‘Dragonfly’ project are excited to see what it uncovers about how life was created and evolved.
“We don't know the steps that were taken on Earth to get from chemistry to biology, but we do know that a lot of that prebiotic chemistry is actually happening on Titan today,” said Dragonfly principal investigator, Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle.
Titan might be classified as a moon but as its name suggests, it's rather large. It’s bigger than Mercury and the second largest moon in our solar system.
During Dragonfly’s 2.7 year baseline mission it will explore environments from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater, where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together.
The Dragonfly robot will draw on 13 years of stored NASA data to pick its target locations.
First on the list are the equatorial “Shangri-La” dune fields, which are eerily similar to the linear dunes in Namibia in southern Africa.
It will then do a couple of “leapfrog” flights collecting samples from areas with diverse geology.
Finally, it will finally reach the Selk impact crater, where there is evidence of past liquid water and organics — the complex molecules that contain carbon, combined with hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.
For those who might have skipped out on year nine science these components, mixed with energy, together make up the recipe for life (that’s what we are!).
“This mission is a visionary combination of creativity and technical risk-taking that will help us unravel some of the most critical mysteries of the universe — including, possibly, the keys to our origins,” said Ralph Semmel, director of the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory - the team behind the Dragonfly project.
Dragonfly won’t launch until 2026 and it’ll take another 12 years for the robot to complete it’s 1.2 billion+ kilometre journey with its arrival expected in 2034.
