NASA will send a drone to Saturn’s moon Titan with the mission of searching for life on this celestial body. This mission is part of a program to reveal all the secrets of this moon of Saturn. The project is ambitious and is expected to succeed in finding different proofs of the existence of life.
The drone that NASA has prepared receives the name of Dragonfly and you will have to face the weather conditions. Titan does not offer the best conditions for exploration, we are talking about a moon frozen to the extreme with an atmosphere rich in nitrogen and liquid oceans under a thick layer of ice.
If an atmosphere full of nitrogen and a layer of ice kilometers thick were not enough, Titan has rain. Yes indeed, on Saturn’s moon what rains is liquid methane that fills rivers that end up forming lakes on the surface of this moon. Dragonfly will have to face all this and, in addition, fulfill his mission entrusted by NASA on Earth.
To ensure that the mission is successful, or at least viable, NASA will make the drone Dragonfly has an entire laboratory to collect samples and analyze them, sending the data as soon as possible. The DrACO unit has been integrated, which is an instrument capable of extracting samples of less than one gram.
NASA has the Dragonfly drone ready to fly around Titan looking for signs of life on this moon of Saturn
These light weight samples will be stored and analyzed, sending the results to the Land. The DrACO unit is not the only instrument of space technology with which the Dragonfly drone has been endowed by NASA. The DraMS unit, which is a mass spectrometer, is also housed inside..
The DraMS unit is similar to the one found on Curiosity roaming the surface of Mars. What this space technology instrument does is identify the chemical composition of different samples by decomposition at the molecular level using an ionization process that employs a laser to volatilize these samples.
Dragonfly has a release date and it will be in 2027 so there is still a lot of time for this drone created by NASA to improve. Of course, it will take the drone 7 years to reach Titan. It will be in 2034 when it will reach the surface of Saturn to await its mission that will last about 32 months and will mark a new form of space exploration.