Dragonfly Drone Would Probe Saturn's Moon Titan and Its Waters

NASA announced recently that it would inaugurate a drone known as Dragonfly in 2026 to the Saturnian moon Titan.

According to The New York Times, proposals have spread as well, for an orbiter that could act as a floating probe and splash down a lake as a robotic submarine.

According to Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science research associate Valerio Poggiali, the "Titan submarine is still going."

He added, though, it is not likely to occur before the next summer of Titan or around 2047. By that year, he explained, there would be "more ambient light" and the submarine believably could communicate on Earth on a direct line without the need of an orbiting radio relay.

Titan, the Oddest Place in the Solar System

Titan is considered as the oddest place in the solar system, in some respects, and the world as well, most like our own.

Like Earth, Titan has a thick atmosphere, mostly of nitrogen, the lone moon with much of an atmosphere at all. More so, like this planet, it is characterized by weather, seas, rain, and river.

Nevertheless, in this world, when it's raining, it's raining gasoline. Essentially, hydrocarbon material is drifting down like snow. It shapes into dunes as well by nitrogen winds.

Rivers have engraved canyons by means of mountains of frozen soot. More so, layers of ice are floating on the subsurface of oceans of ammonia.

The predominant surface temperature is negative 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical mud that hopeful astronomers identify as "prebiotic creeps" along beneath a domineering brown sky.

Aside from Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe popular for harboring liquid on its surface.

Laced With Rivers and Lakes

This said news site also specified that astrobiologists have been enthusiastic in getting a closer look at this world since the Voyager 1 leaped "past in 1980 and "radioed back evidence" that its cloudy atmosphere was four times as thick as the earth.

Time, technology, as well as human resourcefulness have since disclosed that the smoggy world could be a natural paradise.

Essentially, Titan's northern regions are said to be laced with a network or rivers and lakes. The largest of them named Kraken Mare, after a Norse monster, is larger compared to all the Great Lakes of North America combined.

Moreover, the Cassini orbiter spent 13 years in the Saturnian system buzzing around, mapping the said features in detail.

Poleward Seas Becoming More Methane-Rich

In Titan hydrology's prevalent models, Dr. Poggiali explained, the existence of methane-nitrogen rain is rising with increasing latitude.

Such presence then, would result in the arrangement of the more "poleward seas" to becoming more methane-rich. Simply put, ethane is behaving a bit akin to salt in marine water on this planet.

He also said that such a composition derived for the filling of liquid, the so-called "Moray Sinus, the large bay in Kraken Mare's northern part," is somewhat surprising.

Furthermore, the scientist elaborated they were expecting it to be "more methane-rich." But what they discovered instead is that the Kraken is much more akin to the second-largest sea on Titan called the Ligeia Mare.

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