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Life On Titan? NASA Dragonfly Spacecraft Will Visit Saturn Moon In Hunt For Life
NASA has provided greater detail on its upcoming Dragonfly mission, confirming that it plans to hunt for signs of life on Saturn's Titan moon. Ever since humans first began looking towards the sky above, the hunt for other lifeforms has been one of the greatest driving factors behind space exploration. Whether it be Mars, the Moon, or moons of other planets — such as Europa — there's a powerful want and desire to find life beyond Earth.
In 2021 alone, there have been numerous developments in this search for life. NASA and SpaceX reached a $178 million contract that'll see the two exploring Europa in 2024. The main purpose of that mission? To study Europa's surface and investigate "whether the icy moon has conditions suitable for life." A team at Harvard also recently launched the Galileo Project to find evidence of alien spacecraft and civilizations. There are numerous ways to go about hunting for life, and regardless of the tactic used, it's something a lot of folks are trying to get to the bottom of.
Along with those projects, NASA has now revealed this will be the primary goal of its upcoming Dragonfly mission (first reported by SciTechDaily). At some point in the mid-2030s, NASA is sending a 'rotorcraft lander' to Titan — Saturn's largest moon and the second-largest natural satellite moon in the entire Solar System. Per a new paper published by the Dragonfly team, the main themes of the mission include, "investigation of Titan's prebiotic chemistry, habitability, and potential chemical biosignatures from both water-based 'life as we know it' and potential 'life, but not as we know it' that might use liquid hydrocarbons as a solvent." In other words, no matter what kind of life could be lingering on Titan, the Dragonfly mission seeks to answer the question once and for all.
Why Titan Could Be Home To Alien Life
While many life-hunting missions are focused on Mars right now, Titan has the potential to be just as interesting — if not more so. Titan is the only moon throughout our entire Solar System with a dense atmosphere, along with being the only world (other than Earth) with liquid on the surface. This includes lakes, rivers, and even large seas that stretch hundreds of miles wide and are hundreds of feet deep. Unlike Earth, however, Titan's rivers, clouds, and rain are made up of methane and ethane. NASA has long speculated that lifeforms may have adapted to survive in these conditions using chemistry not found on Earth. And, as if that wasn't enough, a water-based ocean in Titan's subsurface may house life that's more similar to what we're all familiar with.
The recently published paper also provides some greater insight into how the Dragonfly mission will work. It reads, "Dragonfly's traverse target is the 80 km diameter Selk Crater, at 7° N, where we seek previously liquid water that has mixed with surface organics. Our science goals include determining how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed on Titan and what molecules and elements might be available for such chemistry." This is all incredibly noteworthy because, as the paper further explains, Dragonfly and Perseverance are the first NASA missions to "explicitly incorporate the search for signs of life into its mission goals since the Viking landers in 1976."
It's entirely possible that Titan ends up being a completely lifeless world, but given what astronomers know about it so far, all signs are pointing to potentially huge discoveries. Combined with NASA's plan to also send the first humans to Mars in the 2030s, and it's safe to say that the next decade could be one of the biggest yet for space exploration.
