“We will be flying initially over dunes and then into rugged terrain,” said Elizabeth Turtle, who will lead the mission for the lab as its principal investigator. “We will take images with both downward-looking cameras along the ground track underneath Dragonfly as we fly over the surface, as well as forward-looking cameras, so we’ll be able to look out toward the horizon as well.”

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Titan has long intrigued planetary scientists. On Christmas Day 2004, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent a probe, Huygens, to the moon’s surface. It landed in one piece, revealing a world analogous to a primordial Earth — Dr. Turtle described it as, “eerily familiar on such a different and exotic world.” Rather than water, Titan’s seas are filled with liquid methane.

In addition to a camera, Dragonfly will carry an assortment of scientific instruments: spectrometers to study Titan’s composition; a suite of meteorology sensors; and even a seismometer to detect titanquakes when it lands on the ground. Drills in the landing skids will collect samples of the Titan surface for onboard analysis.

“Titan is an incredibly unique opportunity scientifically,” Dr. Turtle said in an interview in April before NASA’s announcement. “Not only is it an ocean world — an icy satellite with a water ocean in its interior — but it is the only satellite with an atmosphere. And the atmosphere at Titan has methane in it, which leads to all sorts of rich organic chemistry happening at even the upper reaches of the atmosphere.”