Photo Credit IMAGE CREDIT NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
Dragonfly Closeup, Artist’s concept of the Dragonfly rotorcraft in a close-up view
Have you ever wondered about life beyond Earth? As of this writing, NASA has been testing a crucial Space Launch System rocket called Artemis II, the first astronaut-deep-space-trip to the moon in over fifty years. Its launch window runs from February 8 to late April and may act as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond. However, in this article, I want to introduce you to another exciting future mission and to Dr. Chris McKay, award-winning senior scientist, astrobiologist, and planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, and his thoughts on the Dragonfly future Mission to Titan he’s working on. Dragonfly’s 3.3-year mission to Titan is slated to launch in July of 2028. McKay said, “My interest in the Dragonfly mission is the search for life on Titan. Even if the possibilities in that strange environment are very low, that is still what interests me.”
I met McKay at a NASA Ames Research Center science conference and, over time, had the good fortune to attend many other lectures and classes he gave at NASA from 1999 through 2012 and beyond. He generously corresponded with my fourth-grade classes and me over the years. McKay’s lectures included those at the Mars Society, the Cultures of the Imagination (COTI) Conference, and many others. COTI brings the foremost international space scientists, science fiction writers, and artists together to share perspectives on speculation about humanity’s future on this planet and beyond. His workshops for educators held at NASA inspired creative ways to spark students’ imaginations about planetary exploration, including our very own planet Earth.
McKay holds a PhD in AstroGeophysics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been involved in work on numerous instruments that have flown on Mars missions and has conducted extensive research on extremophiles, organisms on Earth that live in extreme conditions. His research has been featured in YouTube videos for numerous universities and on the Discovery and Science channels, and he’s written hundreds of scientific research papers. He has worked in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, the coldest, driest deserts on Earth; the Atacama Desert in Chile, the absolute driest desert; the Namib Desert; the Crystal Caves in Mexico; and more. Exploring extreme environments on Earth may be considered an analog for life on other planets, as these studies of extremes have shown what is possible in terms of the conditions required for life to exist.
Dragonfly’s work on Titan is raising different questions than those posed by studying Mars’s cold, dry conditions. With these key elements of life on Earth’s requirements of liquid water, Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and some collection of other elements, including salts such as Sodium and Chlorine, what will Titan tell us?
By studying Titan, McKay said, “Astrobiology on Titan really means considering possibilities in a strange new world. Liquid water seems to be the defining ecological requirement for life. The question on Titan is, will liquid methane/ethane do as well?” This mission is slated to investigate the chemistry that came before biology on our planet. Titan, then, can be considered an analog to our planet’s early time and can clue scientists in on how life may have come about on Earth.
Dragonfly is an airborne rotorcraft, an unmanned science mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan has a system of liquids that flow over its surface, which is Earth-like, and is the singular moon in our solar system with a thick atmosphere. NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was the fourth probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit and it stayed from 2004-2017. Cassini taught us a lot and mapped Titan’s surface, but also raised many questions about Titan’s seas of liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, and its clouds, rivers, lakes, and rain.
The unique Dragonfly mission is considered one of the most ambitious NASA missions yet, as it sends a car-sized, nuclear-powered octocopter to learn just what makes this distant ocean world tick. Dragonfly has eight rotors and will fly like a huge drone over dozens of promising locations to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and study the progression of prebiotic chemistry on this exotic moon.
Like many things in our 21st-century lives, Dragonfly seems like the stuff of science fiction since it will deliver the largest suite of science instruments ever to another celestial object in space. Dragonfly will study about 70 miles of Titan’s surface, making one flight every 1-2 Titan days, called a Tsol, which is about 16 Earth days, in order to collect geologic surface samples to analyze inside the rotorcraft with its suite of technical instruments. Scientists hope to learn via these diverse locations how the moon’s chemistry has progressed, determine chemical compounds of astrobiological importance, and be on the lookout for indicators of hydrocarbon-based or water-based life.
Some factoids about Titan: The mammoth moon has a radius of around 1,600 miles, making it almost 50 percent larger than our moon on Earth. Titan was discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens on March 25, 1655. Its name stems from the titans of Greek mythology, so the son of astronomer William Herschel, John Herschel, named the moon. Titan is about 886 million miles from the Sun, or 9.5 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance from Earth to the Sun.
The Dragonfly mission is being assembled under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which also manages the mission for NASA. The team includes a wide swath of key players that includes many organizations, universities and NASA sites such as NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Penn State University in State College Pennsylvania, Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, German Aerospace Center in Cologne, Germany, JAXA the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency in Tokyo, and more.
McKay’s advice, given to my students decades ago, that of sharpening skills such as writing, math, and staying curious, still rings true. It appears that McKay practices what he preaches, since he has a strong curiosity about places in space such as Mars, Enceladus, Europa, and Titan. He said that “Sending missions to other worlds, millions of miles away” is one of the amazing perks of his job at NASA. He concluded, “We have to be prepared to be surprised.”
