Click the link below the picture
.
In 2034, a small craft will alight on a distant dune in a place called Shangri-la. This craft, called Dragonfly, will have traveled 746 million miles to eventually land on Saturn’s largest—and most alluring—moon, Titan.
Dragonfly is a radical new approach to studying other worlds. Rather than being bound to slowly creep over the surface, as our Mars rovers have been, it is a rotorcraft, capable of flying several miles at a time. It will hop around from place to place to help us better understand this strange land, where the atmosphere is nitrogen, the dunes are made from ice, the seas are liquid methane, and a potentially globe-wide water ocean may be buried deep below the frozen surface.
The planned Dragonfly mission, set to launch in four years, will include an impressive assortment of remote planetary exploration tools: several cameras that operate at different wavelengths to image the intriguing landscape, a small drill and scoop to collect samples, a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical makeup of those samples, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to study the composition of the surface directly under the craft, and a suite of meteorological and geological sensors to record Titan’s weather patterns and search for evidence of larger-scale activity (such as cryovolcanoes that might spew liquid water instead of lava). This suite of gear will help us get our first true taste of what Titan is really like—and whether it might be holding any important solar system secrets, like whether life could be present beyond our own world.
To date, we have only sent one lonely mission to Titan. Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft carried a small payload: the Huygens probe. While Cassini spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, the Huygens probe lasted less than a month between deployment from its parent spacecraft and the end of its operations, a mere hour and a half after touchdown on Titan’s rugged surface.
.
What future missions to Saturn’s moon Titan will reveal about the universe.
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
https://nautil.us
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a comment