NASA’s Titan Dragonfly will touch down on a field of dunes and shattered ice | Space

The exploration of Saturn’s largest moon Titan is set to take to the sky.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon will touch down on a terrain of dunes and shattered, icy bedrock, according to a new analysis of radar imagery from the Cassini spacecraft.

Launching in 2027, Dragonfly is a rotorcraft that will arrive in 2034 and explore Titan from the air. Its range will be far greater than that of a wheeled rover, with Dragonfly capable of covering around 10 miles (16 kilometers) in each half-hour flight, according to NASA. Over the span of its two-year mission it will explore an area hundreds of miles or kilometers across. However, before taking to the sky on its own, Dragonfly must first arrive on Titan under a parachute, soft-landing on frozen terrain that is hidden from easy viewing by the dense hydrocarbon smog that fills the moon’s atmosphere.

Dragonfly’s landing site will be the Shangri-La dune field, close to the 50-mile-wide (80 kilometers) crater, Selk. This region was imaged by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during its mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, and a team of scientists led by planetary scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell University has taken a new look at that data to produce the most accurate assessment of Dragonfly’s proposed landing site so far.

“Dragonfly … is going to a scientifically remarkable area,” Bonnefoy said in a statement (opens in new tab). “Dragonfly will land in an equatorial, dry region of Titan. It rains liquid methane sometimes, but it is more like a desert on Earth where you have dunes, some little mountains and an impact crater."  …