Discover what we hope to learn about Saturn’s fascinating moon Titan
This Exploring Space lecture will be presented live on YouTube. Don’t miss the program! Sign up to get a reminder.
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a unique destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth.
NASA's upcoming Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform long-range in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. In this program, Planetary scientist Zibi Turtle from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will discuss this fascinating new mission: Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling ~100 miles during a 3-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and to determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.
This program will be presented with live closed captioning.
About the Exploring Space Lecture Series
The Worlds We’ve Touched: Robotic Missions to Other Worlds
Missions that visit and sample other worlds give us a different perspective and expand our understanding in new ways. Mars, Venus, Titan, Bennu: Our understanding of these distant worlds are enhanced by incredible robotic missions that reached out and touched them. Discover more programs in the series.
The Exploring Space Lecture Series is made possible by the generous support of Aerojet Rocketdyne and United Launch Alliance.