NASA’s Dragonfly will land on dunes and shattered ice on Saturn’s moon Titan
NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft is scheduled to reach the Selk Crater region on Saturn’s moon Titan in the year 2034. Scients have characterised the landscape of this region analysing radar images of the area acquired the Cassini spacecraft during its 13 years of exploring the Saturn system. In short, it is a patchwork of sand dunes and broken-up ice.
NASA says that Titan is an ideal destination to study astrobiology, prebiological chemry and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial world. This is because it is an ocean world dominated water and ice with a carbon-rich chemry. The moon has a subsurface ocean of liquid water, methane lakes and rivers on the surface. There are even methane clouds and rai, along with an atmosphere that will allow Dragonfly to fly.
“Dragonfly – the first flying machine for a world in the outer solar system – is going to a scientifically remarkable area,” said Léa Bonnefoy, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, in a press statement. Bonnefoy is a co-author of the study published in The Planetary Science Journal in August.
“Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan – a frigid, thick-atmosphere, hydrocarbon world. It rains liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth – where you have dunes, some little mountains and an impact crater. The radar images we have of Titan through Cassini have a best resolution of about 300 meters per pixel, about the size of a football field and we have only seen less than 10% of the surface at that scale. This means there are probably a lot of small rivers and landscapes that we couldn’t see,” added Bonnefoy.
According to the Cornell Chronicle, Bonnefoy and the other researchers used radar images to map six terrains at the site, which helped them characterise the landscape and gauge the rim height of the Selk crater. This is important because knowing the shape of the crater is essential to making sure Dragonfly can correctly explore the region.
