TITAN, Saturn’s Moon, Will Be Explored In The New Mission of NASA, Dragonfly

NASA has announced the latest mission in its New Frontiers program, called Libélula, which will explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It is the only moon in our solar system that has an atmosphere.

Before it ended in 2017, the Cassini mission flew on Titan while studying Saturn. The data provided by the Hyugens probe, which was part of the Cassini mission, suggested that Titan was the perfect candidate for further exploration.

"It is the first unmanned aircraft landing vehicle and can fly more than 100 miles through Titan's current atmosphere," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "Titan is more comparable to the primitive Earth, the instruments of Dragonfly to evaluate organic chemistry and firearms, the Dragonfly to explore the frontiers of human knowledge for the benefit of all mankind."

This illustration shows NASA's Dragonfly rotor landing vehicle approaching a site on Saturn's exotic moon, Titan.

The New Frontiers program also included the Juno mission to Jupiter, the New Horizons probe visited by Pluto in 2015 and the distant Kuiper Ultima Thule belt object on January 1.

The ultimate goal is for the dragonfly to visit an impact crater, where the most important ingredients for life were mixed when a titan was struck in the past, possibly in the tens of thousands of years.

It is a drone the size of a Mars vehicle, which reaches about ten feet in length.

Titan is chemically similar to Earth before evolutionary life, the agency said. They want to explore the sand dunes to determine if they are made of the same complex organic material discovered in the atmosphere.

Once Dragonfly lands, it will spend two and a half years flying around Titan. It only has propellers, with skids for landing, but it does not have wheels that allow it to roam the surface.

It will be launched in 2026, but it will not reach Titan until 2034 because Saturn is far away from us.

The dragonfly will also explore the atmosphere of the title, the properties of the surface, the subsurface ocean and the liquid on the surface.

Why titan?

Titan is not exactly known for being hospitable.

Larger than our own moon and the planet Mercury, it is unique in our solar system. It is the only moon with clouds and an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane, which gives a diffuse orange appearance.

Its atmospheric pressure is 60% greater than the earth, which means that the type of pressure felt at the bottom of a pool, according to NASA. And the titan surface is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, you have a different meaning on our planet. But the atmosphere of the title is not very different from the primordial land, and life on a road here.

You can consider extraterrestrial life in science fiction, but in 2017 the media confirmed the future presence of life on Titan, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

Vinyl cyanide is a complex organic molecule capable of forming spheres similar to cell membranes. While it may sound toxic, this product is at home in the same country, where large amounts of it are detected through the data of Atacama's large millimeter matrix (ALMA), a group of radio telescopes in Chile.

We also have liquid bodies similar to the Earth on its surface, but the rivers, lakes and seas are formed by ethane and liquid methane, which form the clouds and cause the sky to rain liquid gas.

The temperature of the surface is so cold that the rivers and lakes were excavated by methane, the shape in the rocks and the lava helped to form the characteristics and channels on Earth.

These methane deposits on the surface are the kind of environment that could help vinyl cyanide molecules bind to cell-type membranes, not the basis of organisms on Earth.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/27/world/nasa-dragonfly-titan-mission-scn-trnd/index.html