Searching for Life Under a Methane Rain
In 2034, a small craft will alight on a distant dune in a place called Shangri-la. This craft, called Dragonfly, will have traveled 746 million miles to eventually land on Saturn’s largest—and most alluring—moon, Titan.
Dragonfly is a radical new approach to studying other worlds. Rather than being bound to slowly creep over the surface, as our Mars rovers have been, it is a rotorcraft, capable of flying several miles at a time. It will hop around from place to place to help us better understand this strange land, where the atmosphere is nitrogen, the dunes are made from ice, the seas are liquid methane, and a potentially globe-wide water ocean may be buried deep below the frozen surface.1
The planned , set to launch in four years, will include an impressive assortment of remote planetary exploration tools: several cameras that operate at different wavelengths to image the intriguing landscape, a small drill and scoop to collect samples, a mass spectrometer to determine
