NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon will contact down on a terrain of dunes and shattered, icy bedrock, in response to a brand new evaluation of radar imagery from the Cassini spacecraft.
Launching in 2027, Dragonfly is a rotorcraft that may arrive in 2034 and discover Titan from the air. Its vary will likely be far better than that of a wheeled rover, with Dragonfly able to masking round 10 miles (16 kilometers) in every half-hour flight, according to NASA. Over the span of its two-year mission it is going to discover an space lots of of miles or kilometers throughout. Nonetheless, earlier than taking to the sky by itself, Dragonfly should first arrive on Titan below a parachute, soft-landing on frozen terrain that’s hidden from straightforward viewing by the dense hydrocarbon smog that fills the moon’s environment.
Dragonfly’s touchdown website would be the Shangri-La dune discipline, near the 50-mile-wide (80 kilometers) crater, Selk. This area was imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft throughout its mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, and a workforce of scientists led by planetary scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell College has taken a brand new have a look at that information to provide essentially the most correct evaluation of Dragonfly’s proposed touchdown website up to now.
“Dragonfly … goes to a scientifically exceptional space,” Bonnefoy stated in a statement (opens in new tab). “Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry area of Titan. It rains liquid methane typically, however it’s extra like a desert on Earth the place you could have dunes, some little mountains and an impression crater.”
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Selk is an attention-grabbing location. Estimated to be geologically younger, maybe a pair hundred million years previous, the impression that carved it out would have melted the native ice, prompting interactions between the recent liquid water and natural molecules current within the hydrocarbon soup on Titan’s floor. Astrobiologists are notably within the prebiotic chemistry — chemistry involving carbon-rich molecules however not mediated by residing issues — that might have resulted.
But Cassini’s radar pictures of the world are restricted, with the decision at finest being 1,000 toes (300 meters) per pixel. “There are most likely quite a lot of small rivers and landscapes that we could not see,” Bonnefoy stated.
Scientists know that such rivers do exist on Titan, due to the European House Company’s Huygens lander, which piggybacked on board Cassini earlier than parachuting right down to the floor of Titan in January 2005. These rivers, nevertheless, should not filled with liquid water — the temperature of minus 290 levels Fahrenheit (minus 179 levels Celsius) is much too chilly for that. As an alternative, liquid methane and ethane rain from the frigid sky and wash off the water-ice bedrock and into river tributaries that feed giant lakes.
What Cassini’s imagery did present, nevertheless, is a number of viewing angles. Every time it flew previous Titan — it loved 127 shut approaches of the moon throughout its mission — it seen landmarks within the area of Dragonfly’s touchdown website from completely different angles, starting from inclinations of 5 levels to 72 levels.
By analyzing how the terrain produced different-shaped shadows based mostly on the viewing angle, Bonnefoy’s workforce had been capable of decide the topography of the area inside the limits of the picture decision, discovering no main show-stopping obstacles that Dragonfly would want to keep away from.
The scientists additionally calculated the peak of the rim of Selk crater, discovering it to differ from lower than 650 toes (200 m) tall in some components as much as 2,000 toes (600 m), which is greater than anticipated, indicating a much less eroded crater rim.
The analysis was printed Aug. 30 in The Planetary Science Journal (opens in new tab).
Comply with Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
