NASA officially approves $3.35 billion mission to Saturn’s moon Titan

NASA has officially approved the full development of the robotic Dragonfly mission, working on a revolutionary project to explore Saturn’s largest moon with a quadcopter drone.

Agency officials announced the results of Dragonfly’s confirmed review last week. This review is a checkpoint in the life cycle of most NASA programs, marking the moment when the agency formally commits to the final design, construction and launch of a space mission. The results of each task’s validation review often determine budget and schedule commitments.

Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said: “Dragonfly is a high-profile science mission that has generated widespread interest in the community, and we are pleased to be able to adopt this mission on this mission. Next steps.

In the case of Dragonfly, NASA confirmed the mission’s total life-cycle cost to be $3.35 billion, with a launch date of July 2028. More than 2019, according to NASA.

Breaking the cost ceiling

For a mission as innovative as Dragonfly, rising costs aren’t necessarily surprising. After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn’s hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life.

Dragonfly will be the first mobile robotic explorer to land on the moon and any other planet besides Mars, and the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is the first on Mars. The quality of Dragonfly will be more than 200 times that of Ingenuity, and its distance from the earth will be six times that of Dragonfly.

Despite its remote location in the cold outer solar system, Titan appears to be reminiscent of ancient Earth. An orange haze envelopes Saturn’s largest moon, Titan’s surface covered in sand dunes and methane lakes.

Titan’s frigid temperatures are near zero 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius), which means the water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made several flybys of Titan before its mission ended in 2017, discovering weather systems on the hazy moon. Cassini observations found evidence of hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to create waves in Titan’s methane lakes.

Clearly, Titan is a strange world. Much of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which Cassini launched to land on Titan in 2005. It took the first photos of Titan’s surface, but it only transmitted 72 minutes of data.

Dragonfly will explore Titan for about three years, flying dozens of kilometers about once a month, measuring the probiotic chemistry of Titan’s surface, studying its sticky atmosphere, and looking for biological signatures that might indicate signs of life. According to Elizabeth Tettle, Dragonfly’s principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the mission will visit more than 30 sites in Titan’s equatorial region.

“The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore the ocean world like never before,” Sea Turtle said in a statement. “The team is committed to completing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry at the surface.” Titan and innovative technologies making this unprecedented space mission a reality.

However, this level of ambition comes at a high price. NASA selected Dragonfly for initial development in 2019. The New Frontiers program has an impressive history, starting with the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto in 2015, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.