Dragonfly: Exploring Saturn’s Moon Titan by Rotorcraft by Dr Elizabeth Turtle and Dr Ralph Lorenz

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on its surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life on Earth.

Drs. Elizabeth Turtle and Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, will present an overview of Titan and of NASA’s upcoming New Frontiers mission, Dragonfly. This ambitious mission will send a rotorcraft that will take advantage of Titan’s atmosphere and low gravity to fly from place to place to measure the…