NASA's Dragonfly Rotorcraft Lander Mission to Titan

NASA’s fourth New Frontiers mission, Dragonfly (Turtle & Lorenz 2024), will land a robotic octocopter on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034 to study its prebiotic chemistry, constrain its habitability, and search for potential chemical biosignatures. The target landing site will be a portion of the Shangri-La sand sea just south of Selk Crater, an 80-km impact structure (Lorenz et al. 2021). Taking advantage of Titan’s low gravity and thick air, Dragonfly will aerially traverse to over twenty distinct landing sites on dune, interdune, and icy crater terrains (Lorenz et al. 2018).

Figure 1.  Dragonfly is a large 4.5-meter long, almost 1000 kg aerial rover with a sophisticated and high-mass scientific payload. It will spend its 3.3-year nominal surface mission exploring and sampling Titan’s sand dunes, interdunes, and the icy 80-km Selk Crater impact structure.

On the ground at those sites we will employ our four scientific instruments: a mass spectrometer (DraMS Trainer et al. 2022), a gamma-ray/neutron spectrometer (DraGNS), seven cameras (DragonCam), and a geophysical and meteorological suite (DraGMet). The DrACO sampling system will drill into the surface and ingest surface samples by means of a hydraulic vacuum cleaner. The vehicle spends over 99% of its time on the ground, and therefore while it can and will fly, the term “relocatable lander” brings to mind a better sense for the operations that we expect to execute on Titan.

We seek to determine how far organic chemistry has progressed, to ground-truth the global methane meteorological cycle, to measure the modes and rates of surface geologic processes, to constrain when and where water and organics might have mixed, and to look for evidence that either water- or hydrocarbon-based life may have existed on Titan (Barnes et al. 2021). Our science objectives with respect to organic chemistry are to measure compositions of materials in different geologic settings and to determine presence and abundance of key molecules for Earth-like life. We have goals to characterize Titan’s methane cycle by constraining the atmospheric methane moisture budget at our tropical landing site and assaying the abundance of stored liquid methane in the near-subsurface.

To place our samples into context, we will need to assess their provenance which we will do by determining the conditions for aeolian transport, by determining the transport mode and history of clastic saterials, and by establishing the geologic context of sampled materials. Our fourth goal is to determine where and how liquid water may have mixed with organic material, which we will do with a seismometer to measure current lithospheric activity and, if Titan is sufficiently active seismically, to constrain the depth to Titan’s liquid-water ocean. Other instrumentation will determine the availability of near-surface water ice and constrain past geologic processes.

Dragonfly finally has a goal to search for any potential chemical biosignatures on Titan as may have been produced by either extinct or extant life. Our objectives on this front are to determine enantiomeric abundance of chiral molecules, to determine if patterns exist in molecular masses and distribution, and to follow up on Huygens hydrogen indications with more and more accurate hydrogen profiles of the lower atmosphere.

Dragonfly recently passed its Critical Design Review and we are fabricating hardware ahead of the launch period that opens on 2028 July 5.

Figure 2.  Dragonfly is a single-element mission, and will communicate to Earth directly by means of an 85-cm radial line slot array high-gain antenna, as can be seen here deployed on the ventral (top) side of the vehicle. 

REFERENCES
Barnes, J. W., Turtle, E. P., Trainer, M. G., et al. 2021,
Science Goals and Objectives for the Dragonfly Titan
Rotorcraft Relocatable Lander, The Planetary Science
Journal, 2, 130, doi: 10.3847/PSJ/abfdcf

Lorenz, R. D., Turtle, E. P., Barnes, J. W., et al. 2018,
Dragonfly: a Rotorcraft Lander Concept for scientific
exploration at Titan, Johns Hopkins APL Technical
Digest, 374

Lorenz, R. D., MacKenzie, S. M., Neish, C. D., et al. 2021,
Selection and Characteristics of the Dragonfly Landing
Site near Selk Crater, Titan, The Planetary Science
Journal, 2, 24, doi: 10.3847/PSJ/abd08f

Trainer, M. G., Brinckerhoff, W. B., Grubisic, A., et al.
2022, Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer Investigation at
Titan, in The Astrobiology Science Conference
(AbSciCon) 2022, 239–03

Turtle, E. P., & Lorenz, R. D. 2024, Dragonfly: In Situ
Aerial Exploration to Understand Titan’s Prebiotic
Chemistry and Habitability, in 2024 IEEE Aerospace
Conference, IEEE, 1–5