Dragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Prebiotic Chemistry and Habitability on Saturn's Moon Titan

Titan is an unusual icy satellite and ocean world, with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior.  The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active atmospheric and geological processes, as well as opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past.  These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth.

NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide-ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment.  Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology.  Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at a few dozen sites, traveling over 100 km during a ~3.3-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.

Speaker: Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle (JHU Applied Physics Laboratory)

Talks are held in the STScI John N. Bahcall Auditorium. Light lunch (provided) starts at 12pm; talk starts at 12:30pm.

Planets, Life, and the Universe Lecture Series presentations are also webcast live. Webcasts can be viewed at the STScI webcast site during the scheduled presentation, and can be found afterward in the STScI webcast archive.

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