Nasa unveils Dragonfly – major alien-hunting mission will use flying robot to explore Saturn’s mysterious moon Titan
NASA is landing a flying robot on a mysterious world within the Solar System in its hunt for alien life.
The space agency’s Dragonfly mission will explore the surface of Titan, an icy moon orbiting Saturn that’s a little under half the size of Earth.
Scientists believe Titan may hold the “building blocks for life” in an underground ocean hidden under its frozen crust.
The Dragonfly mission, part of Nasa‘s New Frontiers programme, will launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.
It marks the first time Nasa will fly a multi-rotor driven vehicle for science on another planet.
Announcing the mission on Thursday, Nasa boss Jim Bridenstine said the space agency was “pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and expanding the limits of technology”.
He added: “Dragonfly will be the first drone lander with the capability to fly over 100 miles through Titan’s thick atmosphere.
“Titan is unlike any other place in our solar system and the most comparable to early Earth.
“The instruments on board will help us investigate organic chemistry, evaluate habitability and search for chemical signatures of past or even present life.
“This revolutionary mission would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.”
According to Nasa, Titan is a “unique, richly organic world”, which could provide clues as to how life arose on Earth.
Larger than both the planet Mercury and Earth’s moon, it is the second largest moon in the solar system, and is about 886million miles away from the Sun.
Its surface temperature is around -179 degrees Celsius, with a surface pressure 50 per cent higher than Earth’s.
Dragonfly, which has eight rotors and flies like a large drone, will explore a range of environments on Titan.
The moon has a nitrogen-based atmosphere like Earth, but unlike our planet also has clouds and rain of methane.
According to Nasa, Titan’s weather and surface processes have complex organics, energy and water similar to those that may have kick-started life on Earth.
Saturn's moon Titan: The facts
Here's everything you need to know...
- Titan is Saturn’s largest moon.
- It is an icy world whose surface is completely obscured by a golden hazy atmosphere.
- At 1,600 miles across, Titan is the second biggest moon in our solar system.
- It’s bigger than Earth’s moon (1,100 miles across), and larger than even the planet Mercury (1,500 miles).
- Titan is the only world besides Earth that has standing bodies of liquid, including rivers, lakes and seas, on its surface.
- Like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is primarily nitrogen, plus a small amount of methane.
- It is the sole other place in the Solar System known to have an earthlike cycle of liquids raining from clouds, flowing across its surface, filling lakes and seas, and evaporating back into the sky.
- Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water.
- Scientists have earmarked it as a key target in their search for alien life due to its similarity to Earth.
Dragonfly’s instruments will search for chemical evidence of past or existing life on the moon.
Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa’s associate administrator for science, said: “Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission.
“It’s remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn’s largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment.
“Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.”
Nasa said Dragonfly will first land on Titan’s “Shangri-La” dune fields, similar to those in Namibia in southern Africa.
It will make short flights around the region and collect samples, before progressing to the Selk impact crater.
The lander will eventually fly more than 108 miles, nearly double the distance travelled to date by all the Mars rovers combined.
Dragonfly is the latest in a series of missions under the New Frontiers programme, following on from the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the Juno mission to Jupiter and the OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu.
In other news, it emerged this week that “alien crystals” line mysterious methane lakes on Titan.
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket recently launched the first-ever ‘solar sail’ spaceship powered entirely by sunlight.
Two newly found planets within our galaxy are now prime targets in our search for alien life.
What do you think Nasa will find on Titan? Let us know in the comments…
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