Abstract
Abstract NASA’s Dragonfly mission will send a rotorcraft lander to the surface of Titan in the mid-2030s. Dragonfly's science themes include investigation of Titan’s prebiotic chemistry, habitability, and potential chemical biosignatures from both water-based “life as we know it” (as might occur in the interior mantle ocean, potential cryovolcanic flows, and/or impact melt deposits) and potential “life, but not as we know it” that might use liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent (within Titan’s lakes, seas, and/or aquifers). Consideration of both of these solvents simultaneously led to our initial landing site in Titan’s equatorial dunes and interdunes to sample organic sediments and water ice, respectively. Ultimately, Dragonfly's traverse target is the 80 km diameter Selk Crater, at 7° N, where we seek previously liquid water that has mixed with surface organics. Our science goals include determining how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed on Titan and what molecules and elements might be available for such chemistry. We will also determine the role of Titan’s tropical deserts in the global methane cycle. We will investigate the processes and processing rates that modify Titan’s surface geology and constrain how and where organics and liquid water can mix on and within Titan. Importantly, we will search for chemical biosignatures indicative of past or extant biological processes. As such, Dragonfly, along with Perseverance, is the first NASA mission to explicitly incorporate the search for signs of life into its mission goals since the Viking landers in 1976.
Highlights
A larger amount of oxygen could be incorporated into Titan’s surface organics through reactions with liquid water to produce a range of biomolecules (Neish et al 2008, 2009, 2010; Poch et al 2012; Cleaves et al 2014)
Composition at depth can differ from surface material (Janssen et al 2016), so to be able to detect the presence of near-surface water ice beneath an organic veneer, DraGNS will be sensitive to bulk composition deeper than ∼10 cm below the surface
Was officially selected for flight by NASA as the fourth New Frontiers mission on 2019 June 27
Summary
Titan is unique among ocean worlds in that carbon, water, and energy interact on the surface (Figure 1). Titan’s profusion of organic riches, especially when exposed to transient liquid water, has created potentially habitable environments, the remnants of which are available on Titan’s surface today. The vehicle is a single half-ton X8 octocopter We think of it as a rotorcraft relocatable lander: we spend most of our time on the ground doing science and uplinking data, only flying for around half an hour to a new landing site once every 2 Titan days (32 Earth days). While Lorenz et al (2018b) described the mission implementation, here we provide a complementary focus on the science goals
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