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Inside NASA’s Jaw-Dropping Plans To Fly To Titan, Burn Its Lakes And Bring Home The ‘Origin Of Life’

NASA’s Dragonfly—a kind of drone—will launch in 2025 and reach Titan in 2034 to study Titan’s prebiotic chemistry for almost three years.

Geoff Landis, the science lead investigator for Compass Lab. With Oleson he’s previously worked on a Titan Submarine, to explore its lakes and a a hopper for exploring Neptune’s moon Triton. “

How would a sample return mission land on Titan?
“We expect the landing on Titan to be relatively easy,” said Steven Oleson, lead of the Compass Lab and principal investigator for this study. “Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen—1.5 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth—which can slow the lander’s velocity with an aeroshell and a parachute for a soft landing, just like astronauts returning to Earth.”

“Once Dragonfly has demonstrated mobility on Titan we’ll have a vehicle that can fly around finding samples,” said Landis. “The next step is to use a Dragonfly-like vehicle to pick up samples and bring them to our our sample return vehicle.”

organic compounds called tholins,” said Landis.
The word “tholins” was coined by iconic astronomer Carl Sagan to explain what happens when organic materials, including hydrocarbons but also phosphorus and sulfur, are exposed to radiation and sunlight for a long period of time

The really clever part of the concept is the production of fuel on Titan itself, allowing a sample-return platform to be just a fifth of the mass compared to one that had to take its own fuel along.

Luckily, Titan is the perfect place to source and process propellant without complicated chemical processing. After all, there are lakes full of liquid methane and ethane. “We could use a hose and pump up the liquid from a lake,” said Oleson. Easy!

Meanwhile, liquid oxygen—which would be needed for the fuel to burn—could be produced by melting the hard frozen pieces of water-ice on Titan’s surface, as seen by the Cassini-Huygens probe back in 2005. “A reactor on the surface could grab that and heat it up and use electrolysis to make liquid oxygen and hydrogen,” said Oleson. Storage wouldn’t be a problem, either. “On Titan it’s only a few degrees above liquid nitrogen temperatures, so very easy to keep that cold.”

Oleson and Landis reckon that the small amount of technology development required—chiefly the electrolysis part—could be completed within a decade.

When will the mission launch how long will it take to get to Titan?
This mission would last about 14 years. It would take roughly seven years to get there, and then the same to get back, though well-timed gravity-assists either on the way there or back could reduce the total flight time to just 10 years.

Is Titan more interesting than Europa?
It’s way more accessible—and could be just as interesting. “Europa is the big target because we think there's an underground ocean, but it’s below so many kilometers of ice,” said Oleson. “On Titan everything is so accessible—you could get a submarine and splash down into its lakes [another idea of Oleson and Landis], you can fly around with Dragonfly, and it’s got organic compounds you could get a sample of.”

On Europa is aqueous chemistry—the chemistry of us. However, Titan could tell us something about the building blocks that may have been the origin of life. “As far as an accessible world that’s most like Earth and has organics, Titan really is the place to go,” said Oleson.