Follow Us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter We may still be a while away from sending humans to distant parts of the solar system, but you can send your name to Saturn’s moon Titan, which has the ingredients for life on its surface thanks to NASA’s Dragonfly mission. Dragonfly is an SUV-sized nuclear-powered helicopter that NASA aims to launch toward Titan in 2028. The agency opened a special events page in late October to let the public put in their name. the spaceship. The names will be placed on a chip on Dragonfly during spacecraft assembly, and all names must be submitted by Jan. 15, 2027. The agency says the mission has no “ordinary itinerary,” as Dragonfly targets areas miles (or kilometers) away after reaching the surface in 2034. “Nearly a billion miles away, an extraordinary fate awaits. Titan has an atmosphere, rivers and lakes, seasons, vast dunes. and a landscape rich in organic material,” NASA officials wrote on the event page. “Upon arrival in 2034, Dragonfly will fly from place to place on this intriguing world to uncover clues about this remarkable moon and the chemistry that could help us understand the ingredients of life.” Dragonfly will be one of the few flying craft on another world, the first being NASA’s brave Ingenuity mini-helicopter that reached Mars alongside the still-operating Perseverance rover in 2021. It was only designed to make five flights, but reached 72 until its blades were damaged during a landing on January 18, 2024. NASA is now planning a SkyFall mission to Mars that would use three helicopters and that could be launched in late 2028 for the Red Planet. You may like Dragonfly, however, it is not the first mission to Titan: it is Huygens, which operated for just a few hours on January 14, 2005 after its launch from the Cassini spacecraft. Huygens was the first lander to a world outside the solar system, measuring Titan’s atmosphere and taking data from the surface. A mosaic image of Saturn’s moon Titan, composed of images produced by the Cassini spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Idaho) For its part, Cassini passed by Titan more than 100 times before the mission concluded in September 2017, providing valuable long-term data on the moon from above. Dragonfly aims to show the Moon up close for about 3.3 Earth years. Their destinations will include dunes and a young impact crater called Selk, according to NASA. “Dragonfly is expected to make a flight every one to two days on Titan, which is called Tsol and lasts approximately 16 Earth days,” NASA officials added about the mission. Dragonfly will stop at a variety of geological sites, where it will collect samples of surface material for analysis inside the helicopter using a suite of scientific instruments. Dragonfly’s goals include learning more about prebiotic chemistry, or the conditions before life emerged in a place; discover if Titan had habitable conditions in the past; and look for “chemical indicators” of life based on water or hydrocarbons.
