Dragonfly

And the next visitor is being built now.

NASA's Dragonfly, a flying robot with eight rotors, is due to launch in 2028 and to arrive in the mid-2030s, hopping from place to place across Titan.

So, tonight, on Titan, under an orange sky, a slow methane drizzle may be falling softly onto a quiet shore.

Beyond Saturn, the Sun is far away, and the planets are cold and blue.

Coming up on Space Time...

NASA names Dragonfly's landing site on the Saturnian moon Titan, new clues about the Earth's moon's ancient magnetic field, and why galaxies in the early universe look so weird.

All that and more coming up on Space Time.

Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.

NASA has identified the landing site where its Dragonfly rotorcopter will first touch down on the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan.

The target area comprises a large dune field with some inter-dune terrain south of Silic Crater and stretches along the edge of a range of mountains or hills.

The International Astronomical Union, the global body responsible for officially designating objects in space, has approved naming the region Amakik Undae.

The name literally translates into the one who locks up the wind.

Well, it's all the sort of things that w- that Alice and I have been talking about, um, the scientific missions.

You know, this wonderful, um, clipper mission to, uh, Europa in, in, and, um, the, the Dragonfly mission, um, to, to Saturn's moon, Titan.

I mean, to learn more about these.

These places are so beautiful, so fascinating, so alien.

What I'm most excited about is the Titan Dragonfly mission.

Um, I'm very optimistic that we will find evidence of something on Titan, perhaps microbial life as we see it here on Earth, or perhaps some kind of rudimentary thing that is the methane, ethane equivalent of, uh, of microbial life.

That's what I'm most excited about, honestly, is the mission to Titan, because I do believe that that is the most promising environment for us to discover life elsewhere, even just in our solar system.

And what we need to do is get a Martian sample return going so that we can really figure out whether those are fossil structures or some kind of geological phenomenon that we just aren't aware of yet.

So I w- do believe that once we get Martian, once we get Martian sample return, we, I believe that we will find evidence of past microbial life on Mars.

What I'm most excited about is the Titan Dragonfly mission.

Um, I'm very optimistic that we will find evidence of something on Titan, perhaps microbial life as we see it here on Earth, or perhaps some kind of rudimentary thing that is the methane/ethane equivalent of, uh, of microbial life.

That's what I'm most excited about, honestly, is the mission to Titan, because I do believe that that is the most promising environment for us to discover life elsewhere, even just in our solar system, and that's in the next 10 years, I think.

So I'll have a lot of balloons in my lab with ion thrusters strapped to them.

Have you considered collaborating with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, who built a Titan chamber, essentially, for the Dragonfly mission that's upcoming?

Yeah, I think that was in use and expensive with the NIAC phase one budgets, but that's something that we would pitch.

I mean, phase two, we're not going to be able to reach 94 Kelvin for the test chamber in phase one.

And that's 2028, so the timing might line up well.

That would be really exciting.

I mean, it wasn't even in my brain that you could potentially try to work with the Dragonfly team on this.

It would be so cool to have a pairing of something like that with Dragonfly, the way that we had ingenuity with Perseverance.

Two other proposed missions will explore Saturn's moons in new ways.

The Dragonfly mission to Titan will take advantage of the thick nitrogen atmosphere and use a drone for the first time on a natural satellite.

Outside of the national space agencies, a privately funded mission called Breakthrough Enceladus is also planned, though currently this project appears to be dormant.

But the mission I'm most excited about is the Enceladus Explorer, a project funded by the German Aerospace Center that proposes to send a nuclear ice mole, yes, you heard that correctly, to melt its way deep into the crust and expose untouched niches within the ice to search for life.

There have been plenty of mission proposals in the past, but all of them were canceled before they came to fruition.

What would be incredible is a probe that could either make its way into Enceladus' ocean somehow, or at the very least, search the plumes for signs of life.

There is already a mission called Dragonfly going to the nearby moon of Titan.

However, this won't have anything to do with Enceladus.

Unfortunately, it does not currently have any new missions at it.

It will eventually get Dragonfly.

So it's going to be a while before we can get satellite images of this particular wonderful geometric shape.

But there is other spacecraft out there that we've been paying attention to.

We've sent Europa Clipper out to study the moon Europa, which we know has a giant ocean underneath this incredibly thick ice crust.

We'll send Dragonfly to Titan to a moon of Saturn.

to study there.

We know there's a lot of organic chemicals there.