For its newest planetary science mission, N.A.S.A aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life.

The project called Dragonfly will be the first of its type. N.A.S.A plans to launch a car-sized quadcopter in 2026, arrive at its final destination in 2034, and then fly to several spots hundreds of kilometers apart. It will be outfitted with devices that can recognize huge organic compounds.

Why Titan?

Titan is as geographically diverse as Earth and larger than the planet Mercury. The only surface seas in the solar system outside those on Earth are found on this big, cold moon, which also has mountains of ice and a dense atmosphere rich in methane.

On Titan, however, liquid hydrocarbons are sloshing across the rivers and lakes. If there is water on the moon, scientists believe it is hidden beneath the frozen surface in an ocean.

Despite being an entirely different globe from our own, “we know it has all of the components that are necessary to help life form,” according to Lori Glaze, director of N.A.S.A’s planetary research division.

Titan’s complex rings and chains of carbon are fundamental to many basic biological processes and may resemble the building blocks from which life on Earth evolved.

New Frontiers

The N.A.S.A New Frontiers program, which provides funding for medium-sized planetary scientific initiatives that don’t exceed $1 billion USD, has now funded its fourth mission.

It follows in the footsteps of the asteroid-explorer OSIRIS-REx, the Juno probe, which is presently orbiting Jupiter, and the New Horizons spacecraft, which recently passed by Pluto and the Kuiper belt object MU69.

It was one of the two program suggestions being thought about since December 2017. The Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR) mission, which would have circled Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, was the other finalist.

In November 2038, that spacecraft would have collided with the enormous space rock, sucked up a sample from its surface, and returned it to Earth.

Dragonfly will land near Titan’s equator, among dunes composed of solid hydrocarbon snowflakes. It will be powered by heat from radioactive plutonium, much like N.A.S.A’s intrepid Mars rovers.

But with eight rotors, it will be able to cover much more distance than any wheeled robot ever has – as many as nine miles per hop.

Elizabeth Turtle, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the mission’s chief investigator, claimed during a news conference on Thursday that flying on Titan was actually simpler. The gravity of that world is weak, yet its atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s.

However, the craft must be capable of independent movement. Dragonfly is substantially more complex than a typical drone since it takes 43 minutes for light signals from Earth to reach Titan.

A navigation system had to be created by scientists so that the spaceship could recognize risks and fly and land on its own.

Where will Dragonfly land?

In flight, it will sample Titan’s hazy atmosphere and provide aerial images of the landscape below. But the craft will spend most of its time on the ground, testing for biologically relevant materials.

Its ultimate destination is Selk Crater, the site of an ancient meteor impact where scientists have found evidence of liquid water, organic molecules and the energy that could fuel chemical reactions.

The gutsy design prompted N.A.S.A to ask two independent teams to examine the mission plan and assess whether the project could be executed at the cost allowed, Zurbuchen said. Ultimately, the agency decided the project was doable.

Although this is a novel kind of planet exploration, Turtle pointed out that this technology is already extremely advanced on Earth.

It’s innovation, not invention, that we’re really doing with Dragonfly, not invention.

Since 2005, when the Huygens probe peaked through Titan’s murky orange clouds to show an incredible picture, N.A.S.A hasn’t been able to glimpse the surface of the moon. On this odd moon, each Earth-like feature has a distinctly chemically foreign twist.

Titan possesses liquid methane instead of liquid water, according to research published in the journal Nature. Titan contains frozen water ice instead of silicate rocks. Titan contains hydrocarbon settling out of the atmosphere in place of dirt.

At nearly 1 billion miles from the sun, its world is bitterly cold; temperatures average minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (-180 degrees Celsius) on a mild day. Were more oxygen present, those abundant hydrocarbons (the main component of gasoline) would quickly catch fire.

The presence of all that methane — a molecule that is usually destroyed by sunlight in a few million years – is what’s most intriguing to scientists. Its persistence suggests some process that is continually renewing Titan’s supply.

They now believe that Titan experiences a weather much like what occurs on Earth – except its clouds are made of hydrocarbon gas, and its precipitation falls as organic compound rain and snow.

Life as we don’t know it

Turtle said Thursday that Titan in many ways resembles the infant Earth, before life evolved and irrevocably changed the planet.

“Titan is just a perfect chemical laboratory to understand the chemistry that occurred before chemistry took the step to biology,” she said.

Johns Hopkins University planetary scientist Sarah Hörst, a member of Dragonfly’s science and engineering team, once compared Titan to a cosmic kitchen in which scientists have found all the ingredients for life.

However, as you were not present when they combined, you are in the dark as to why. In 2017, she stated, “When you bake it, you never know what will happen.

The sum of all those parts can be zero. Or, she added, they might be indicators of “life as we don’t know it”—a branch of species that relies on hydrocarbons rather than water.

Since the Huygens landing, scientists have discovered even more molecular treasures, including negatively charged molecules linked to intricate chemical reactions, rings of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen that can be used to build amino acids, and molecules that can group together to form an envelope that resembles the membranes that surround cells.

“We are pretty darn sure that everything in these broad, big-picture categories that’s required for life exists on Titan,” Hörst said. “At some point it just comes down to, well, shouldn’t we go check?”

2019 © The Washington Post. This article was originally published by The Washington Post.

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