NASA’s Dragonfly Mission To Explore Saturn’s Moon Titan Delayed Until July 2028
NASA has announced a provisional launch date for its Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The mission, which was originally scheduled to launch in 2027, has been delayed due to budgetary uncertainty. The Dragonfly team will now move forward with the next stage of development for the car-sized, nuclear-powered rotorcraft drone.
The mission, named Dragonfly, will investigate Titan, a world rich in organic molecules, to gather new science. “The Dragonfly team has successfully overcome a number of technical and programmatic challenges in this daring endeavor to gather new science on Titan,” said Nicola Fox, NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator.
The reason for the launch delay was revealed at NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting by Lori Glaze, director of the agency’s planetary science division. She cited uncertainty about the project’s funding and budget for the delay, and stated that Dragonfly will be taken back to the Agency Program Management Council in spring 2024 after NASA’s Financial Year 2025 budget proposal.
Dragonfly is set to be the first NASA mission to visit the surface of an ocean moon. The drone will search for conditions that could imply habitability and investigate how far any possible prebiotic chemistry has progressed on the moon of Saturn.
In addition to investigating Titan’s potential habitability, Dragonfly will also collect samples to determine the composition of surface materials under varying geological conditions. The investigation of Titan is of high priority for planetary scientists because, in addition to being an ocean world, it is the only solar system moon known to possess a thick atmosphere and Earth-like hydrological cycle.
The Dragonfly mission, built and operated by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, has seen several components already tested over the deserts of California and in wind tunnels at NASA’s Langley Research Center. A full-scale model has also been tested in Johns Hopkins APL’s Titan Chamber, which simulates the frigid temperatures and atmospheric pressures of Titan’s methane-rich environment.
“We’ve demonstrated that we’re ready for the next steps on the path to Titan, and we’ll keep moving forward with the same curiosity and creativity that have brought Dragonfly to this point,” said Dragonfly principal investigator Elizabeth Turtle.
With the provisional launch date set for 2028, the Dragonfly mission continues to move forward in its quest to explore and uncover the secrets of Saturn’s moon Titan.