NASA is embarking on an incredible new £256m mission to a moon where there amazingly “could be life”.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a contract to launch the agency’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s Titan moon on a Falcon Heavy rocket in 2028.
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the second largest moon in our solar system, it is bigger than the Earth’s moon and the planet Mercury.
Whether there is life on Titan has been a long debated question and is a key topic of scientific assessment and research.
For decades scientists have been puzzled by the amount of methane that persists in Titan’s atmosphere. Titan has clouds, rain, rivers, lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.
According to one theory the impact of a meteorite may have provided enough heat to liquify water for perhaps a few hundred or thousand years.
According to NASA, Titan’s nitrogen atmosphere is so dense that a human wouldn’t need a pressure suit to walk around on the surface. They would, however, would need an oxygen mask and protection against the freezing temperatures at Titan’s surface which are around -179C.
But soon all our questions could be answered as the Dragonfly rotorcraft mission will explore Saturn’s moon Titan, and it is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Programme.
It will explore prebiotic chemistry and chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Saturn’s moon.
With a dual quadcopter design, the rover is designed to “hop” between different sites on Titan to collect data.
NASA is currently targeting the mission to launch between July 5, 2028, and July 25, 2028 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is leading the mission with a team of scientists and companies around the world including Lockheed Martin, JAXA, DLR, and CNES.
The Dragonfly team comprises of scientists, engineers, technologists and managers who have deep experience on missions that have explored the solar system from the Sun to Pluto and beyond, as well as experts in rotorcraft, autonomous flight, and space systems from around the globe.
Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Programme.
