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

Titan is a place where methane and ethane rain from the sky and have a hydrologic cycle like the kind we’ve only ever seen before with water on Earth. These organics form rivers and flow into seas, carrying sediment with them. This mission will be going to the equatorial desert to understand that sediment.

Titan, like Europa, is an icy ocean moon. Titan is even larger, though. While Europa’s ocean is measured to have about twice the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined, Titan’s ocean (which possibly has significant quantities of ammonia and organics and alcohols mixed in) has five times the liquid volume of all of the earth’s oceans combined.

Sitting atop this ocean is a thick icy crust, upon which is a surface that looks more earth-like than any other planetoid surface in our solar system. Although it looks earth-like, the chemistry is in fact fundamentally different. It is based around organic solvents instead of water as the dominant driver of weather and erosion. The water on titan is stored in the bedrock!

And the sediment on top? Well, titan’s atmosphere is 5% methane. That methane gets hit by UV light and turns into more complex organics. Titan’s atmosphere is also rich in nitrogen and carbon monoxide, which add Nitrogen and Oxygen to these complex organics. These organics sediment out and coat the surface. Around the equator, they blow into large dunes in a desert biome. Precipitation falls and erodes the tar-covered landscape. These complex organics get mixed together as sediment in the rivers and dumped into the beds of the polar lakes and seas.

Dragonfly isn’t going to the seas. Too dangerous for the first mission here. We don’t know what we’ll find, and it’s hard to communicate with earth, and there is complex weather and clouds called the “polar hood” that might interfere. Dragonfly is going to the desert, to observe the complex organics falling from the sky and gathering on the ground to be blown into dunes. These are the ingredients that will get mixed together in the seas. There is also a cool crater there that calculations suggest melted the H2O bedrock and created a water-filled pool for the organics that has long-since frozen over. However, calculations suggest that this liquid water pool full of organics may have stayed partially liquid for hundreds of thousands of years in the subsurface. This is a location where we can study: “what happens if you take a bunch of complex organics and add water?” How far along the path to life could they get before the snapshot was frozen?

Let’s fuckin goooooooooooo

That's unexpectedly good news!

that sounds very cheap in the grand scheme of things. imagine if we didnt spend so much with wars.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

NASA has formally approved the robotic Dragonfly mission for full development, committing to a revolutionary project to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone.

This review is a checkpoint in the lifetime of most NASA projects and marks the moment when the agency formally commits to the final design, construction, and launch of a space mission.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon.

The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."

Turtle's science team proposed Dragonfly to NASA through the agency's New Frontiers program, which has developed a series of medium-class Solar System exploration missions.

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One step closer to ornithopters becoming real

Oh boy! I hope I live long enough to see this mission completed.

Negative 290f. Little past jacket weather. Will they have to stick a radioactive isotope in the thing to keep the batteries warm, I guess? Seems like a good and hard mission, right there. I want a picture of weatherproof methane aliens, damn it.

We want Healthcare.

Send Elon.