Though there is plenty of carbon around on Titan, the cold temperatures keep water in its solid form as ice and also limit the energy available. But how likely is this? It is thought that life at the very basic level needs at least three ingredients: liquid water, a carbon source and an energy source. With all these building blocks around, there is speculation about whether life – for example, in the form of microorganisms – could exist on Titan. But we haven’t pinned down the exact intermediate steps in this process – something that we may be able to observe on Titan. We know that macromolecules such as DNA and proteins formed from simpler organic molecules such as amino acids.
One important aspect of the mission is to shed light on the processes that led to the origin of life on Earth. From there, it will fly to different locations to investigate the nature of the organic material. The Dragonfly mission will land in 2034 in the relative safety of one of those dune fields called Shangri-La. This snow is then rearranged into dunes by wind. Other complex organic (meaning carbon-based) molecules form in Titan’s atmosphere and fall like snow. Instead, hydrocarbons such as methane, a gas at temperatures typical for Earth, condense into a liquid that fills the lakes. Idahoīecause Saturn and its moons are about ten times further from the sun than the Earth, temperatures there are so low (-179☌ on average) that water is frozen solid at all times and behaves like rocks on Earth. The only difference is that it is not water raining from the clouds. It revealed that Titan is the only world in our solar system other than Earth with a currently active hydrological cycle – complete with rain, rivers and lakes, some of them more than 100 metres deep. The Huygens probe touched down on Titan’s surface in 2005. The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 until 2017 and was the first to use radar and other instruments to peer underneath Titan’s clouds during numerous flybys.
Its atmosphere consists mainly of nitrogen (96%), similar to Earth’s atmosphere (80% nitrogen, the rest being oxygen and less than 1% of other trace gases). In fact, Titan’s diameter of 5,149km is larger than the planet Mercury’s at 4,880km. Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system behind Jupiter’s Ganymede. Studies have shown Titan may be able to host primitive lifeforms and is the ideal place to study how life may have arisen on our own planet. Titan boasts an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s, which has shrouded this world in mystery for a long time. Only a handful of objects in our solar system fit that bill. The real prize will be the Dragonfly mission in 2026, sending a drone to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan – as just announced by NASA.įor a craft to become airborne, it needs air or, more generally, an atmosphere. The Mars Helicopter will piggyback on the NASA Mars 2020 rover mission to demonstrate the technology. Flying on other worlds is the next leap in the exploration of our solar system.
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