Today, I am proud to announce that our next New Frontiers mission
Dragonfly
so Dragonfly
Go Dragonfly!
We're building a drone the size of a car and we're going to fly it on
a moon.
Dragonfly will explore Saturn's largest moon
Titan.
In 2027, Dragonfly will launch on its 872 million kilometre
journey to Titan, the most earthlike
moon we've discovered so far.
By the time Dragonfly's baseline mission is over,
we'll have flown more than a 100 miles, which is almost
double the total distance covered by all of the Mars rovers combined.
I'm a co-investigator on the Dragonfly mission, and I'm really
looking forward to being able to see Titan through Dragonfly's eyes.
Titan's been running a big experiment, and it's time for us to
go collect the results.
Titan is so amazing because, in a lot of ways, it's very earthlike.
It's the only moon in the Solar System that has an atmosphere, it
has rain, it has clouds, it has lakes and rivers and sand dunes and
mountains.
And so, big picture – Titan has all of the things that we
think are required for life.
We think that there is a period in Earth's history around the time
when life originated when Earth's atmospheric composition was
actually probably quite similar to Titan's atmospheric composition
today. And so, another one of the questions we have is, you know,
what was the chemistry like on the early Earth?
How was it related to what's happening on Titan today?
And what does that tell us about the origin of life on Earth?
Titan is enshrouded in this kind of orangey yellow haze that keeps
you from being able to see the surface. And so it was like, OK,
we can't see the surface,
it's the only moon in the Solar System that has an atmosphere,
and now we're finding out that there are all of these carbon
containing molecules in the atmosphere that are really, really
interesting.
Titan is so interesting that we needed to know
more about it.
Titan is one of the best, if not the best place in the
Solar System to fly.
If you personally were on Titan and you had some kind of wings
attached to your arms for some reason.
If you flapped your arms, you would actually be able to fly under
your own power. It's actually, it's that easy.
And it's a combination of two things.
One thing is that the gravity is pretty low on Titan.
It's about one-seventh of the gravity on Earth.
So that helps because you don't need as much energy to get off
the ground.
But the other reason why it's so easy to fly on Titan is
that the atmosphere is actually more dense than it is at the
surface of Earth. So it would be much, much easier.
It is much, much easier, I think, to try to figure out a concept to
fly on Titan versus trying to send a rover.
Dragonfly is not a little backyard drone.
It's about the size of a small car, and so that makes it pretty
robust to a lot of things that a backyard drone would not be robust to.
Although if it crashes into a tree, as long as we know that it
crashed into a tree on Titan, we will be super excited.
We will call that a successful mission because we found life on
Titan accidentally.
We just don't know that much about the surface.
And so, on the one hand, that scientifically is exciting.
And on the other hand, that's a little scary when you're an
engineer that's trying to build a spacecraft where you can't
call AAA if something goes wrong.
Because of the time delay in light travel between Titan and Earth,
Dragonfly is going to have to navigate on its own.
There isn't going to be somebody sitting on Earth with a joystick
flying Dragonfly.
There's no GPS at Titan.
There's nothing to tell where it is.
Our maps that we have right now are not very good.
And so, kind of one of these a little bit like, you know, build
the plane as you're flying it type things in terms of
how we navigate.
And basically, the way that it's going to be doing that is
by taking a really, really lot of images.
Where basically every time
we fly, we're actually going to fly further than where we want to
land so that we can do reconnaissance aerial imaging of
the place we think we want to go next and then we'll turn around and
go back to where we had planned to land and land there.
Once we tell it, OK, you know, you're going to go do this thing,
it will have the whole sequence of what it needs to do.
It will be able to make decisions if something goes wrong and it will
decide, OK, this is what I'm doing now.
And then will report back and say, you know, look, mum, I did it!
Hopefully!
There's definitely a lot of challenges involved in having these
big time delays because we can't control anything in real time.
We have all these ideas about the requirements
for life, and the big picture we tend to think of the requirements of
life as a source of energy, building blocks of life, so like
just things that are made out of carbon, and some type of liquid.
We think that Titan is a place that has the possibility of having
life. Things that we know we have on Titan are a whole, whole variety
of what we call organic molecules.
So one of the reasons why we're so excited about carbon when we're
thinking about the search for life and the origin of life is that, you
know, selfishly, life on Earth is based on a lot of carbon containing
molecules. And so that's one of the reasons why we're so excited
about it. But actually, atomically, it's very interesting.
Carbon can make four different bonds, whereas when you
look at something like oxygen, which can really only make one bond
or two bonds. If you think about your kids' Legos, you can only build
so many things with a little like one piece Legos.
But when you start using the two or the three or the four, whatever,
you start to be able to build these really complicated things.
And it's the same thing with carbon because it can make these
four bonds. It really allows it to make all of these different kinds
of molecules. And we think that we see evidence of a lot of that
going on in Titan's atmosphere.
So we already have a bunch of different simple little Lego
structures in the atmosphere, and we just want to know how
complicated they got and whether or not that is kind of similar to
the level of complexity that we see on Earth, which might
indicate the possibility for the presence of life.
And so we want to go and see, you know, with an actual Titan
scale laboratory.
What has formed from these processes?
And so the more opportunities we have to be able to explore places,
the fewer limitations we have on answering our science questions,
which is really important.