Cassini, the joint NASA-European Space Agency Space Probe now orbiting Saturn, is closing in on the end of its mission when it will crash into the second largest planet of the solar system. According to Scientific America, scientists are already mulling a follow-on mission to the moon Titan, a weird world where methane and ethane fall like rain and flow like rivers and streams into seas and lakes. Titan is the only other planet in the solar system that has bodies of liquid, albeit not of water. Its atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s and gravity lighter than our home planet.
Thus, Titan is the perfect place to send a probe like Dragonfly, according to Scientific America.
Dragonfly would be an eight-bladed vertical takeoff and landing aircraft powered by a multimission radioisotope thermoelectric generator (MMRTG) that will convert heat from decaying plutonium-238 into electricity. The source of energy will allow the mission to last for years, even decades.
The probe would land in an area selected thanks to the close examination of Titan by Cassini. From then on it would stay for a few days in one place, using a drill and sampling system to examine the surface. Dragonfly would also have a spectrometer and other sensors to study Titan’s geology and atmosphere. When the probe is done at one site, it would take off and scout out another place to land.
Titan has fascinated scientists ever since Cassini studied up close, landing the Huygens probe on its surface. The moon of Saturn turned out to be an alien world that, because of the presence of organic materials in its ethane and methane seas, may be an abode of life, though nothing like anything found on Earth.
Another idea being kicked around for Titan is a boat or submarine that would ply the seas of Titan, examining its chemistry.
Dragonfly would be classified as a New Frontier mission, costing about $1 billion, NASA chooses one such mission to fund every five years. Past examples of New Frontier missions include New Horizons, which fly past Pluto less than two years ago, and the Juno, currently orbiting Jupiter. Dragonfly could be selected as part of a list of possible New Frontier mission in November 2017 with the final selection taking place July 2019.
If Dragonfly makes the cut, it would be launched toward Titan sometime in the mid-2020s with an arrival in Saturn space in the early 2030s. Barring accidents or equipment malfunctions, Dragonfly could spend most of the decade and beyond flying through the skies of Saturn’s moon, a migratory aircraft as it were.
