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We still may be some time away from sending humans to distant reaches of the solar system, but you can send your name to Saturn’s moon Titan, which has the ingredients of life on its surface thanks to NASA’s Dragonfly mission.
Dragonfly is an SUV-sized nuclear-powered rotorcraft that NASA aims to launch towards Titan in 2028. The agency opened a special events page in late October to allow members of the public to put their name on the spacecraft. The names will be put upon a chip on Dragonfly during the spacecraft’s assembly, and all names must be submitted before Jan. 15, 2027.
The agency says that the mission has no “ordinary itinerary,” as Dragonfly aims to between areas miles (or kilometers) apart after arriving on the surface in 2034. “Nearly a billion miles away, an extraordinary destination awaits. Titan has an atmosphere, rivers and lakes, seasons, sweeping dunes and a landscape rich in organic material,” NASA officials wrote in the event page. “Upon arrival in 2034, Dragonfly will fly from place to place on this intriguing world to uncover clues about this remarkable moon, and the chemistry that could help us understand the ingredients for life.”
Dragonfly will be one of just a few flying crafts on another world, with the first being NASA’s plucky Ingenuity mini-helicopter that arrived on Mars along with the still-running Perseverance rover in 2021. Ingenuity was only designed to make five flights, but made it to 72 until its blades were damaged during a landing on Jan. 18, 2024.
NASA is now planning a SkyFall mission on Mars that would use three helicopters, and which may launch as soon as late 2028 for the Red Planet.
Dragonfly, however, is not the first mission to Titan: that would be Huygens, which operated for just a few hours on Jan. 14, 2005 after deploying from the Cassini spacecraft. Huygens was the first lander on an outer solar system world, and measured Titan’s atmosphere and took data from the surface.
For its part, Cassini flew by Titan more than 100 times before the mission concluded in September 2017, providing valuable long-term data about the moon from above. Dragonfly aims to show the moon from up close for about 3.3 Earth years. Its destinations will include dunes and a young impact crater called Selk, according to NASA.
“Dragonfly is expected to make one flight every one to two Titan days, which is called a Tsol and lasts about 16 Earth days,” NASA officials added of the mission. Dragonfly will stop at a variety of geologic sites, where it will collect samples of surface material for analysis inside the rotorcraft by a suite of scientific instruments.”
Dragonfly’s goals include learning more about prebiotic chemistry, or the conditions prior to life arising in a location; figuring out if Titan had habitable conditions in the past; and looking for “chemical indicators” of life based on water or hydrocarbons.