#NASA #mission #Titan #green #light
Dragonfly will be the name of the special aircraft with which the NASA then it will take a closer look at Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. They have been working on the plans for years in the background, but now a final decision has been made that the extremely exciting mission can actually be realized.
The mission was also approved in the recent NASA budget with a total budget of 3.35 billion dollars and a launch planned for July 2028.
Since the journey to Titan is long, in order to shorten it, NASA added the costs of a heavy rocket to its mission, with which the rotary-winged flying structure can arrive at its destination in 2034.
Titan’s atmosphere is dense and its gravity is low, so it is especially suitable for traveling in such a helicopter-like vehicle, which is the easiest way to change location on the celestial body. Both the atmosphere and the surface contain countless compounds and organic molecules that can be the starting point for the origin of life.
According to the experts, Titan can resemble the early Earth that existed before life in many ways, so its investigation also means looking back into our own past. Dragonfly will fly to dozens of points on Titan and use its on-board laboratory to analyze the composition of the rocks, fluids, and atmosphere there.
Perhaps it’s easier to think of Dragonfly as an aerial version of the Curiosity rover (“rolling lab”). Titan’s atmosphere is three times denser than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, but the temperature is quite low, around -180 degrees Celsius.
The vehicle can fly in Titan’s dense atmosphere with 4 pairs of rotors.
Source: NASA Johns Hopkins APL Steve Gribben
Dragonfly 4 will fly with a pair of coaxial rotors, and cameras, sensors, and devices for analyzing the samples – a mass spectrometer similar to the one used on the Mars rover Curiosity, which has already been proven there – will be placed on board. Although it is little known, Titan also has a subsurface ocean, so this may also play a role in chemical transformations, in case of contact with the surface.
The spacecraft will also be able to take samples from the surface with a small drill, and approx. to analyze one gram of each of these at each location. Dragonfly can travel tens of kilometers in a single hour, and according to the plans, it will fly to a new location every 16 Earth days (that’s one day on Titan). The mission is planned for a duration of 2 years, during which time the vehicle can travel hundreds of kilometers, but of course it will spend most of its time on the surface doing analyses, measurements.
Special test chamber (open in the picture, but closed during the test), where they can test the operation of the device in conditions similar to Titan’s atmosphere and surface.
Source: NASA Johns Hopkins APL Ed Whitman
Since not much sunlight penetrates Titan’s atmosphere, the use of a solar panel could not even arise in connection with Dragonfly’s energy supply. They will use a radioisotope generator that has been used many times in space research – it will also be similar to the one used on the Mars rover Curiosity.
For the time being, the operation of the vehicle is being tested with the help of a functioning model that is half the size of the original, and there is even a test chamber available for this, where the conditions prevailing in Titan’s atmosphere and surface can be simulated. We already have information about the surface of the moon, on the one hand, from the remote sensing data of Cassini, and on the other hand, through the European Huygens probe that traveled with it, which landed on the celestial body in 2005. These are also the reasons for the high degree of interest shown by science in Titan.
