The Dragonfly New Frontiers Mission to Titan

Saturn's giant moon Titan has been revealed to be remarkably Earth-like, with a landscape of vast dunefields, river channels and lakes under a smoggy  sky punctuated by methane downpours. Titan serves as a frigid laboratory in which the same processes that shape our own planet can be seen in action under exotic conditions. Titan has a rich inventory of complex organic molecules that may provide clues how the building blocks of life are assembled.

Exploring such a scientifically rich environment demands mobility, so that diverse sites can be visited, and particular interactions, such as those between liquid water from impact crater melt with organics, investigated. Fortunately, Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere means that aerial mobility is easy to accomplish: rotorcraft on Titan have been proposed even 20 years ago.

In 2019 NASA selected the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab’s Dragonfly as its 4^th New Frontiers mission.  Dragonfly is a relocatable lander, an octocopter powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which provides heat – valuable in Titan’s frigid (94K) environment – as well as electricity. Dragonfly – roughly the size of the Perseverance rover – carries a formidable scientific payload and will fly, using a large battery trickle-charged by the generator, for about 30 minutes every couple of Titan days (i.e. about once a month), covering several kilometers in each hop.

Initially landing in the dunefields nearby, it will traverse to the 80km Selk impact crater, making geomorphological, meteorological and even seismological investigations over more than 3 years.  I will discuss the transformative scientific opportunities of this mission, some of the technical innovations that make it possible, and the project’s current status.  In April 2024 NASA confirmed the Dragonfly project development for a 2028 launch and arrival in 2034, one Titan year after the Huygens probe descent, information from which allows definition of the winds and atmospheric environment to be encountered.