By Staff Writer: Jerri Clewis
Starting in 2026 and predicted to land in 2034, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will set out to explore Titan and learn more about the chemistry and habitability of multiple surface sites, according to NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. Dragonfly is intended to discover much of the functioning of Titan and the composition of its world.
The upcoming mission will build off the legacy of the Cassini-Huygens mission of 2004-2017, which is credited with providing much, if not nearly all, of the known information about Titan, according to The Planetary Society.
Before 2004, not much about Titan was known besides that it was a “hazy orange ball about the size of Mercury” with a dense nitrogen atmosphere, making it the only known world with such besides Earth, NASA reports in an overview of the moon. Astronomers had also managed to study Titan’s temperature and calculate its mass, but it wasn’t until 1979 that a mission called Pioneer 11 confirmed those discoveries.
Later, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft got a better look at Titan, but they couldn’t see much past its thick and hazy atmosphere. After a launch in 2004, Cassini-Huygens changed everything when it became the first to make it past the atmosphere and get a look at the surface of Saturn’s largest moon.
What the mission discovered was extraordinary. Titan has lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane that are replenished by rain from hydrocarbon clouds, according to NASA. Liquid methane plays the same role on Titan that water plays on Earth, acting as the filler in rivers, lakes, seas, and in dunes. Mixing things up, there is also a large internal ocean likely composed of water and ammonia within the icy moon.
Cassini-Huygens discovered much about the once-mysterious planet, but the source of the prominent methane on Titan is still unclear. Experts hope the upcoming Dragonfly mission will provide much-needed answers about the moon.