Dragonfly mission to Titan confirmed

Let’s go to Titan. NASA’s Dragonfly mission is moving into its next phase.

Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon evokes a space mission which will be one of the most impressive in the coming years: the Dragonfly mission, has just been confirmed by NASA.

franceinfo: The Dragonfly mission will explore Titan, one of Saturn’s moons?

Mathilde Fontez: Yes, that’s it, the schedule was confirmed a few days ago by NASA, after numerous postponements and budget uncertainties. The mission is called Dragonfly, and it will take off in 2028, heading towards Titan, one of the moons of the gas giant Saturn. And yes, it’s an ambitious mission.

Firstly because it is a flying drone – dragonfly means dragonfly – it is a sort of 450 kilo helicopter which is being designed to explore Titan. Dragonfly will fly with eight rotors, like a large drone. It will be able to travel tens of kilometers in an hour. It will be only the second craft to fly in an extraterrestrial atmosphere, after the Ingenuity helicopter, which is currently on Mars.

Except that Dragonfly will be 6 times further from Earth: Titan is 1.3 million kilometers from our planet – on average. It will take 6 years for the probe to reach it. It will arrive in 2034…

So Dragonfly will study this moon?

To analyze its atmosphere, to measure its winds, to take images of its lakes, its dunes. Yes, there are lakes and dunes on Titan: this satellite is very different from our own satellite, the Moon: it is a very rich world, which fascinates specialists in planetary environments.

From the outside, it’s a big orange-yellow ball: Titan is enveloped in an opaque atmosphere – 4 times thicker than that of Earth – which should also be an advantage for Dragonfly to fly. But under the mists, it is a real small planet, very cold: -170 degrees. It is therefore not water that flows on the surface of Titan, but methane.

This is another example of complex meteorology, climate, geology, very different from Earth. We know, for example, that there is a whole methane cycle on Titan, just as there is a water cycle on our planet. There are winds, storms, rains…

Only one probe has ever landed on Titan ?

Yes, this satellite has already been observed a lot from the outside, in particular by the Cassini mission, which made 127 close flybys between 2004 and 2017. And in 2005, the Huygens probe, designed by the European Space Agency, detached itself from Cassini to descend onto the satellite, slowed by a parachute. It was Huygens who took the only images of Titan’s surface. But he only survived 90 minutes.

Dragonfly should take many more images, and especially conduct chemical analyses. Because this methane, these organic molecules on Titan, these are the basic building blocks of life. Studying chemical reactions on this satellite could help us understand what a habitable world is, what chemical processes lead to the development of life… Another chemistry, another world, exotic.