New NASA Mission Announced: Titan

    Today, NASA announced a new mission, this one to one of Saturn's many moons, Titan. Titan beckons a visit from humanity so she can tell her tales to us. It is the 2nd largest moon in the solar system; slightly smaller than Jupiter's Ganymede, but still bigger than Mercury. With a thick atmosphere that is "four times denser than Earth's" and is much colder temperatures (appx. -290° F), some wondrous geologic and atmospheric processes are actively shaping the surface, such as raining freakin' methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆)! Yeah, these molecules of carbon and hydrogen, combined with a nitrogen rich atmosphere (like Earth), are very important to the creation of life as we know it (on Earth anyways), and they just lay around as liquid (not gas!) on the surface of Titan in rivers and lakes of hydrocarbons. While methane and ethane are produced by living things (e.g. aromatic farts), it can easily be produced through natural geologic processes just as well and it is likely to be so on Titan. However, one can't help but wonder that due to the amount of liquid hydrocarbons, if there are some organic processes occurring on Titan today or in the geologic past. Titan is on the short-list of possible habitats of extra-terrestrial life, so perhaps the moon is home to hydrocarbon-eating amoebas, some kind of worms burrowing in the hard, crusty ground, or maybe the beginnings of some type of DNA or RNA molecules. Only time, and Titan, will tell.

False color (near infrared) image of Titan from the spacecraft Cassini. You can see sunlight reflecting off the hydrocarbon lakes. In "normal" color, the atmosphere is too thick to see through. Image credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Univ. Ariz., Univ. Idaho.

    In addition to the coolness that is Titan, the mission involves a 10-foot long, eight-rotor quadcopter! Yeah, there's going to be a flying drone on another world. And it won't be the first! The Mars 2020 rover launching next July, will have a small, single-rotor helicopter that will scout ahead of the rover in 90-second recon surveys. Titan's quadcopter, named Dragonfly, is a flying laboratory that will be able to land, take samples, and do analyses in several locations. The Dragonfly can fly up to 5 miles in a single trip, eventually culminating more miles over its spectacular 2.7+ year-long journey than any of the Mars rovers. Unfortunately, it will be a while: the mission "will launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034."

The surface of Titan as seen from Huygens, the lander paired with Cassini. Image credit: ESA, NASA, JPL-Caltech, Univ. Ariz..

    Today's announcement was a toss-up with a mission to Comet 67P (the comet that the ESA (European Space Agency) went to with the Rosetta and Philae duo craft between 2014 and 2016). The mission, called CAESAR (Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return), was to visit the comet, get a sample of it, and return to Earth. It wouldn't be the first sample return mission: JAXA (Japan's space agency) is currently operating an ongoing mission to return a sample of an asteroid and is planning for a sample return mission of one of Mars' moons, Phobos or Deimos. CAESAR may still live on in another mission in the future, but for now, Comet 67P will have to wait to tell her story as we look to Titan to share hers.