"Dragonfly" Titan explorer drone, NASA funds Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) Options

[Explorer1]

Huygens was one of the highlights of my youth, and to see another landing (hopefully followed by many more!) will be wonderful. Just a coincidence it will be exactly one Saturn year later? (2005-2034).

And oh, wow, to see Huygens itself again, that would be something (if it's not covered in organic rain or washed downstream...)

[MahFL]

Interesting mission. I wonder how it will avoid landing in a lake of liquid ethane or sinking in anything resembling quicksand.

It does a recon before landing.

[Hungry4info]

I wonder how it will avoid landing in a lake of liquid ethane.

It will be landing near the equator and heading to Selk crater. It will therefore likely be much too far from any liquid bodies of ethane to worry about that.

[volcanopele]

Cassini RADAR mosaic of Selk and the surrounding environs: https://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~perry/RADAR/RADAR_Selk.png

[MahFL]

It will be landing near the equator and heading to Selk crater. It will therefore likely be much too far from any liquid bodies of ethane to worry about that.

Good point, it's landing in sand dunes.

[Explorer1]

Well, one thing that is guaranteed is Dragonfly finding many, many surprises. Could there be very small liquid bodies below the resolution of Cassini's radar?

[vjkane]

Ralph L: recovered from the celebration yet?

[vjkane]

A year or so ago, the Cassini VIMS team released a surface color map of Titan. Does anyone have a link to the final product? I'd like to see what it looks like around Shangri-La and Selk.

Titan VIMS color map

[JRehling]

Here is a zoom to the region of Selk (upper center) and the Huygens landing site (lower center). This is from an 8MB jpg at:

It looks like by crossing from the dunes outside Selk across its rim into into its center at least three distinct terrain units would be reachable with a fairly short traverse, and maybe much, much higher diversity that the spatial and spectral resolution here cannot convey.

https://data.caltech.edu/records/1173

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[rlorenz]

Well, one thing that is guaranteed is Dragonfly finding many, many surprises. Could there be very small liquid bodies below the resolution of Cassini's radar?

Nothing is impossible. But this is relatively unlikely - 2034 is a season that is dry and will have been dry for some years before at this latitude (slightly north of the equator),
in an area with sand dunes (note that Huygens landed in a streambed, slightly south of the equator)

[lilmac]

Exciting news. I find Titan to be the most fascinating body in the solar system. I was a bit disappointed by the Huygens imagery. Good to see we will get a second crack at viewing the surface, close-up, beneath the haze. Glad NASA is fully behind the mission (instrumentation, fabrication, design, engineering) and leveraging our first rate expertise. Can’t wait for 2034!

[dolphin]

Exciting news. I find Titan to be the most fascinating body in the solar system. I was a bit disappointed by the Huygens imagery. Good to see we will get a second crack at viewing the surface, close-up, beneath the haze. Glad NASA is fully behind the mission (instrumentation, fabrication, design, engineering) and leveraging our first rate expertise. Can’t wait for 2034!

Agreed. Good post.

I do wish the site selected had potential liquid deposits vs sand dunes

[Superstring]

Really excited about this! Question to anyone who knows: What will be the resolution of the images from the surface (as compared to Huygens), and will we get any sort of global imagery/mapping?

[mcaplinger]

What will be the resolution of the images from the surface (as compared to Huygens), and will we get any sort of global imagery/mapping?

I'll refer everyone to http://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/News-and-Resou...4_03-Lorenz.pdf -- I'm not sure how many of the details of the imaging system design I'm free to disclose, and of course these are early days. From that document:

DragonCam—Dragonfly Camera Suite (Malin Space Science Systems). A set of cameras, driven by a common electronics unit, provides for forward and downward imaging (landed and in flight), and a microscopic imager can examine surface material down to sand-grain scale. Panoramic cameras can survey sites in detail after landing...

I think it's safe to say that the imagery quality will be many orders of magnitude improved over Huygens.

As for "global coverage" -- Titan is larger than Mercury, so one vehicle will only see a tiny fraction of the surface. But we'll see pretty much all there is to see from one vehicle's vantage point.

[MahFL]

Most of the time DragonFly will be GroundFly...