One of NASA’s most exciting missions will begin in 2027, when a special helicopter called Dragonfly will be sent to a distance of more than a billion kilometers from Earth. The destination is Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn and one of the few places in the solar system that could harbor life. Now the place where the “dragonfly” will spend the night has been chosen.

In seven years, it will deliver the Dragonfly (which weighs 450 kg) to Titan, where the mission should last two and a half years.

• Mission Titan – A billion kilometers from Earth is an amazing world where life can exist

Dragonfly is supposed to land in an area called Selk Crater, in a frozen dune field. The researchers say the site is scientifically significant and was chosen after years of research.

Dragonfly will land in Titan’s equatorial region, an arid area of ​​sand dunes and frozen ground. This is an area not only with dunes, but also with impact craters and other geological formations worth analyzing. More detailed information will be received in the coming years, and there is still time, because the achievement is only planned for 2034.

The mission to Titan will be extremely ambitious: Dragonfly will have to travel more than 150 km on this celestial body, collect samples from several places and make various measurements. Aerodynamics should be easier on Titan than on Mars, given the substantial atmosphere and very weak gravity, but the presence of abundant methane and temperatures of -180 degrees will be difficult to overcome. On Mars, Ingenuity was designed to withstand nighttime temperatures of -100 degrees

• Jupiter’s Europa is the story of a celestial body with heat, oceans, and ice that could actually support life

Titan is more than a billion kilometers from Earth, and this satellite of Saturn is much larger than the Moon and even the planet Mercury. It is the most distant celestial body we earthlings have ever visited, the Huygens probe arriving there in January 2005.

Titan is fascinating because it is one of the few places in the solar system where life could exist. It is the only moon in the solar system that has a significant atmosphere and liquid on the surface, even if it is not water but methane. There are also oceans of water and ammonia under the ice.

Many astrobiologists see Titan as a “living laboratory” for studying Earth’s distant past. Water, ammonia, methane and ethane have been found on Titan. Frozen water has a hardness close to that of concrete. But the combination of temperature and pressure caused the methane to liquefy, and the first images sent by Huygens showed the presence of rivers and lakes of methane.

Sources: sciencealert.com. universetoday.com