Send your name to Saturn's moon Titan with NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission
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.
Key points
- Dragonfly, however, is not the first mission to Titan: that would be Huygens, which operated for just a few hours on Jan.
- A mosaic image of Saturn's moon Titan composed of images produced by the Cassini spacecraft.
- 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.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Idaho) 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.
Additional details
- Dragonfly is an SUV-sized nuclear-powered rotorcraft that NASA aims to launch towards Titan in 2028.
- Dragonfly aims to show the moon from up close for about 3.3 Earth years.
- Titan has an atmosphere, rivers and lakes, seasons, sweeping dunes and a landscape rich in organic material," NASA officials wrote in the event page.
- 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.
- The names will be put upon a chip on Dragonfly during the spacecraft's assembly, and all names must be submitted before Jan.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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