Come out and hang ten on Titian, flying around Saturn’s rings…
T-shirt design available here: https://balooie.com/surfing-titan-t-shirt/
Ready to surf on Titan? We got pictures of a shoreline thanks to space probes…
PANORAMA OF THE “SHORELINE” ON TITAN Panorama of the “Shoreline” on Titan, stitched from Huygens DISR Side-Looking and Medium-Resolution Imager raw data. Image: ESA / NASA / JPL / UA; image processing and panorama: René Pascal
Excuse me, I need to just stop and Geek a moment.
We got a frigging shoreline picture from a moon of Saturn.
Wow.
Ok, back to why I’m here Geeking Science … can you believe it is not that?
No, really it isn’t the shoreline. It is the Dragonfly.
Not a dragonfly.
Photo by Ashish Khanna on Unsplash
But THE Dragonfly
NASA’s (presently concept-only but working toward reality) drone the size of an SUV to be deployed to Titian around 2034 (if we can keep our Congress looking forward and out). Titian has a great dense atmosphere. While Ingenuity has been slugging it out in the thin air of Mars during its over fifty flights, the Dragonfly will have plenty to work with.
At the moment, they are still testing out the eight rotor design (video below). As drone technology continues to mature on Earth, the tech will be adjusted to work on other worlds with different atmospheres. Instead of exploring worlds by inches, flights will let us cover yards and maybe even miles. And in an atmosphere like Titian we can drop in something the size of a large car and all the technology we can shove in that space. How much are we going to learn having all the instrumentation available? Considering how many different things normally fit into the small probes, I am completely Geeking about the flying space lab we will be sending to Titian … with initial results coming back before children born this year turn ten are old enough to vote if everything goes right. (see update below about timeline correction)
Interested in this tech? You can follow the Dragonfly development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory site here: https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/
(And let me give kudos to whomever designed the Dragonfly logo … it’s gorgeous.)
UPDATE – TIMELINE CORRECTION: Budget reductions have reduced the mission budget by nearly 20%. This could push the launch date from 2027, and cascading the previously timeline of arrival at Titan in 2034. (The Downlink, Planetary Society, 12 May 2023)