The Dragonfly mission will fly towards Titan in 2026

– News of July 2, 2019 –

It was one of the most anticipated decisions in 2019. The US Space Agency had to choose between two candidates for the fourth mission of the New Frontiers program. NASA can only fund one of them. The first mission proposed to collect samples of 67P / Churyumov-Guerassimenko, the comet that had been visited by Rosetta and Philae. The second mission aims to explore Titan, a moon of Saturn, thanks to a propeller drone. This mission, called Dragonfly, was finally selected on June 27, 2019. It is a very ambitious choice. In the entire solar system, only two moons were visited by a lander : the moon of course and Titan, which had been quickly explored by the European Huygens lander, which had been transported by the Cassini spacecraft.

Titan is one of the most exciting celestial bodies in the entire solar system. Despite its distance and intense cold, the moon of Saturn has a thick atmosphere. Like on Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is mostly composed of molecular nitrogen. The atmospheric pressure is a little higher than on the planet Earth, about 1.5 bar on the surface. The gravity on the surface of Titan is much lower than the gravity on Earth. It should therefore be quite simple to fly a drone. Titan is exceptional because it is the only other body in the solar system to have liquids on its surface. The poles of the moon of Saturn are traversed by lakes and seas of methane fed by seasonal rains. It remains to be determined to what extent these liquids could accommodate the elementary bricks of life.

Dragonfly, the new mission of NASA’s New Frontiers program, has to answer this question. The Dragonfly mission will take off in 2026 and reach Titan in 2034. The US Space Agency hopes to fly a drone on Titan for more than two years, which would cover nearly 200 kilometers in Titan’s atmosphere. The drone of the Dragonfly mission is a quadcopter equipped with 8 propellers spread over four axes. As it is very dark on Titan, the drone will draw its energy from a RTG, a small nuclear battery capable of providing low power for decades.

The drone of the Dragonfly mission will make bigger and bigger leaps until flying over distances of more than 8 kilometers at the end of the mission. It will land in the area called Shangri-La, a dark area that may host a dry ocean. Then the drone will travel to the crater Selk, which may once have received liquid water. To fulfill its mission, Dragonfly will embark a camera, two spectrometers and a weather station.