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NASA to search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan

NASA to search for life on Saturn’s moon Titan

  • The Dragonfly rotorcraft will collect samples of the moon's surface, take photos, measure possible titanquakes, and search for signs of microbial life.
  • It would be the second time NASA has landed a spacecraft on Titan.
  • The mission is part of NASA's Frontiers programs, in which teams compete for funding for ambitious space missions.

NASA plans to send a flying drone to Saturn's moon Titan to search for signs of life and study other aspects of the remarkably Earth-like world. The rotorcraft is set to land on Titan — a moon that's 10 times farther from the sun as Earth is, and bigger than the planet Mercury — in 2034.
"Titan is unlike any other place in the solar system, and Dragonfly is like no other mission," said NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen. "It's remarkable to think of this rotorcraft flying miles and miles across the organic sand dunes of Saturn's largest moon, exploring the processes that shape this extraordinary environment. Dragonfly will visit a world filled with a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself."
Dragonfly will land on a stretch of soft dunes which Elizabeth Turtle, the lead investigator of the mission, described as "the largest Zen gardens in the Solar System wrapped around almost the entire equatorial region." After landing, the Mars rover-sized craft will spend about two-and-a-half years taking photos, collecting samples of the surface, using seismometers to detect possible titanquakes, and scouting out landing sites for future missions.

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