Titan, one of many moons of Saturn, is home to a multitude of land features, from mountains of ice to lakes of methane.
Last year, the Cassini spacecraft, tasked with exploring Saturn, reached the end of its life, descending into the gaseous body of the planet.
But NASA plans to return to Saturn with a mission to Titan, the planet’s largest moon.
University of Idaho astronomer Jason Barnes said he joined the competition to design this mission late and has been playing catch-up. As of December, he is one of two finalists to send their project to Titan.
“We have a lot to prove,” Barnes said. “We have to invent some new things for this to work. But, I think we can convince the review panel this is going to work.”
Barne’s proposal includes flying over what could be a gooey surface with a quadcopter drone called Dragonfly, breaking NASA’s tradition of rovers.
Barnes said Dragonfly would only fly about an hour per Titan day — equivalent to 16 Earth days. But the drone’s real work would be conducted on the ground while it recharges, studying the building blocks of life.
“When solar ultraviolet hits that methane, it creates organic molecules,” Barnes said. “We think this might be analogous to the early Earth.”
Barnes said the drone will use a vacuum to collect samples of interactions between substances on the surface.
“If an asteroid hits the surface, liquid water could mix with the organic molecules in the atmosphere and could form amino acids and that water could stay liquid for as long as 10,000 years,” Barnes said. “That’s our goal — land on Titan in the ‘sand’ dunes and find an interaction between liquid water and organics and see how far along the chemical reactions can get.”
Barnes said Dragonfly would have a variety of instruments to study the surface, the most important being a mass spectrometer to test the composition of substances — This would answer some of NASA’s looming Titan questions: what are the “sand” dunes made of? What organic molecules have formed?
“Titan is one of the easiest places in the solar system to sample,” Barnes said. “There’s enough atmosphere that you can suck stuff up with a vacuum.”
Dragonfly would have a seismometer to measure earthquakes and listen to see how deep the ice is. It would have sensors to test the atmospheric pressure and wind speeds.
Other sensors on board would include eight cameras and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer.
If selected, his project would launch in 2025 and land in 2034 — it takes a while to get that far out in the solar system.
Barnes is revising his proposal for review in December. He said he expects NASA to pick a project by summer 2019.
“They also have a site visit. That’s more the ‘Shark Tank’ level,” Barnes said. “The goal there is to find the differences between poor design and a poor job explaining it.”
Barnes is working with the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University. Shannon Mackenzie, a UI graduate, has worked with Barnes on the project since its inception and continues to work on it at APL.
Nishant Mohan can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NishantRMohan