By Barbara A. Schmitz

The fourth New Frontiers mission is now in its integration and testing phase, and Dragonfly, a first-of-its-kind rotorcraft, is two years from launch to learn more about Saturn’s moon.

Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator with the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said Saturn’s moon Titan is the only moon with an atmosphere. Its atmosphere is four times denser than the atmosphere on Earth, and it is 40 times easier to fly on Titan than on Earth. Thus, Dragonfly will be exploring Titan by flying from place to place on the moon’s surface, rather than driving, to investigate the moon’s habitability.

But the mission isn’t about detecting life, she said. Rather it is about investigating the chemistry that came before biology on Earth. “This is primarily a chemistry mission,” Turtle stressed.

Turtle said a large team has been working on this mission for 10 years, and they are now building the flight hardware, with a launch window opening on July 5, 2028.

“That timeline will get us to Titan in December 2036,” she said. If they miss that launch window, the next launch window would be in 13 months, so they’ll be doing everything possible to meet that first window, she said.

Dragonfly will explore Titan for about three years. Since Saturn’s moon is -290 degrees Fahrenheit and doesn’t have wide temperature swings, the bedrock of Titan is water ice; its atmosphere is nitrogen rich with a small percentage of methane. It also has a deep interior ocean of liquid water.

It should make one flight every one or two Titan days. A Titan day is about 16 Earth days, Turtle said.

“Titan’s landscape is actually quite familiar, even though its materials are very different,” she said. “Rich organic materials cover the surface. At places where water ice has melted in the past, you get liquid water and complex carbon. Titan is a singular destination for understanding the chemical process on our own planet that supports the development of life.”

Turtle said Titan has sand seas that wrap around obstacles, is home to impact craters and tectonic structures, and may have potential cryovolcanism, although there is no proof of the latter. Cryovolcanism occurs when the solid ice crust is less dense than the liquid water or brine ocean beneath it, meaning the liquid does not naturally float upward, according to BiologyInsights.com.

Dragonfly will investigate Titan’s methane hydrological cycle, geologic processing, and opportunities for organics and liquid water to mix. It will also inventory the diversity of complex carbon-rich materials and the chemistry at work on Titan’s surface, which should revolutionize understanding of prebiotic chemistry in the solar system.

Much of what they know already is due to the Cassini mission, which carried a probe to investigate Titan’s atmosphere and landed in January 2005. However, while Cassini had a number of instruments designed to measure the surface, it didn’t tell them what the detailed composition of Titan is.

Dragonfly’s mission elements include a cruise stage, which should take 6.5 years for Dragonfly to reach Titan; its entry, where it will take about two hours to descend Titan’s atmosphere and land on the ground; and launch of its rotorcraft lander, which will transplant the entire payload from place to place but is capable of doing aerial missions as well. Turtle said they will use high beam antennae to communicate directly from Earth to the surface of Titan.

They will explore more than 30 sites, and they have the potential to perform aerial scouting for future landing sites, she said.

However, Dragonfly won’t answer all their questions, she said. “We will still have a lot of questions why Titan has this spectacular atmosphere and how long it has had this atmosphere,” Turtle said. “But unfortunately, Titan was not designed to answer those questions.”