How Dragonfly will explore Saturn's 'bizarro Earth' moon, Titan
Bryné Hadnott • Jul 13, 2021
Why send a typical lander when you can send a dual-quadcopter?
That’s the question Dr. Elizabeth Tuttle and her team at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory asked when they developed NASA’s next New Frontiers mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The dual-quadcopter, aptly named Dragonfly, will carry a suite of instruments designed to analyze Titan’s surface, which can vary from pure water ice to crumbly, orange-tinted organic sands.
Over a series of flights throughout its three-year nominal mission, Dragonfly will hopscotch over Titan’s surface, investigating new places to visit and previously identified safe sites. Dragonfly’s science instruments include a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to analyze the elements beneath its ski-like legs, a UV light to detect fluorescent, organic molecules, and a mass spectrometer to analyze more complex, biologically relevant samples.
What will Dragonfly search for?
Of particular interest are samples from areas on Titan where the orange organics drifting out of Titan’s haze layer may have interacted with liquid water. Scientists have shown that when tholins, lab-generated organics similar to those on Titan, interact with liquid water, biomolecules such as amino acids and urea form.
On early Earth, it was this combination of organics and liquid water that gave rise to the diverse array of biomolecules and, eventually, life that thrives on Earth today.
More:
https://www.planetary.org/articles/how-dragonfly-will-explore-titan
