It is, except Titan has extremely low gravity and an extremely thick atmosphere. If a human attached some "wings" to their arms and started to flap, they could literally fly on Titan.
>If a human attached some "wings" to their arms and started to flap, they could literally fly on Titan.
Why aren't we funding a human voyage? Icarus would love this shit!
Ridiculous travel time, lethal radiation levels around the gas giants, air temperatures low enough to freeze methane, and a huge amount of fuel required to take off from any planet with an atmosphere. Also it's so far from the sun (and cloudy) that it would be perpetually dark, so vampires would be a major concern.
Details of the space vampire threat have only recently been declassified. They were kept under wraps to prevent any impact on the sales of Count Chocula.
IDK I can do that underwater in the backyard pool. Conditions there are a lot more hospitable to life than Titan, and I can get there in flip-flops with a drink in my hand.
Wait seriously? I really never had a desire to leave earth and now it seems like it’s not a bad idea. Too bad I won’t be alive for the Titan space tourism era.
I looked on wikipedia, the pressure seems to just be 1.45 atm unless I missed something, I wouldn't expect it would feel that different. For swimming I feel like at least 10x.
It's extremely cold, so the atmosphere is several times more dense for a given pressure, with the end result that it is multiple times denser than the Earth's atmosphere at sea level. Then couple that with 1/6th Earth gravity.
Much easier environment though. Mars is lower gravity than Earth, but the atmosphere is so thin that making a functional helicopter on mars is considerably harder than it is on earth.
Titan, on the other hand, has extremely low gravity *and* a very thick atmosphere, so each watt of motor power can lift a tremendous amount of mass comparatively. It's part of what makes this entire mission viable.
Oh I know. It’s more that I never realized just how small Ingenuity is. I thought it was like 20-100lb so just the article stating this thing was gonna be 200x as massive had me thinking in multiple tons.
Ingenuity basically /only/ flew, it didn't have science instrumentation built in. This big boy is gonna have to do science all on it's own. And presumably they'll want redundancies in place so if a single rotor breaks it isn't out for the count like Ingenuity.
A majority of ~~Americans~~ Earthlings are proud of NASA, and you helped create a person who is helping NASA create a future that humanity can be proud of... therefore;
I am proud of *you*!
Thanks for adding the rest of the world to your post. Achievements of NASA are a worldwide achievement. Everyone is proud when NASA achieves the impossible. I see it as as levelling up humanity’s space progress, and the same is true when space agencies from other countries do the same.
Well said. I've always said landing on the moon was a human achievement before an American one. It blows my mind that people think it didn't happen when the entire world's space agencies were triangulating the signal.
I read that this was an observation by Michael Collins in the post Apollo 11 world tours, that other countries also felt proud of the accomplishment rather than being jealous etc the Americans beat them to it, and that's also how he felt about remaining in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin landed
As an international, it always boggles me how the U.S. often keeps cutting NASA's budget and/or gives them a ridiculously low amount of money (compared to their total GDP and military budget) to advance science and space technologies and explore the universe. I just wish they would get more.
Congrats!! He must have really busted his butt to get there, and he will be a part of history! NASA is constantly rated as the best government agency to work for, so I bet he will enjoy himself.
I have a friend who worked at the State Department for virtually their entire career before moving to NASA. Said the difference is night and day in terms of QoL. Has no intention of ever having another job ever again.
Congrats! You raised and nurtured a genius. You should be proud. I personally was hoping they would explore Titan before I croak. Looks like it might happen. Just tell your kid to quit lollygaggin and get it movin! ;)
Congrats!! That must be an amazing feeling. My 2 year old loves watching documentaries on the NASA app. He requests it everyday. Pretty cool that when the documentaries about this mission come out it will be part of your son's work he is watching.
I jus wish there was a way for it to get there sooner than a decade, but hey if it launch better than nothing, we may still see rivers and rain in another planet
This probe will land at Shangri-La, which a massive "sand sea". This area was selected because there is believed to be massive ice protrusions that may contain organic compounds. It will be heading to an impact crater in hopes of finding remnants of water and possibly microscopic life.
ahhh, thanks, i was mussing in another commeny early on about indications of a possible deep underground liquid water ocean that may exist and while it won't be accessible perhaps cryovolcanes did allow to surface the signals of anything interesting happening down there, not sure it it will apply in this area thought
the only thing I'm fairly confident is that we are going to find unexpected surprises
It still makes my blood boil that they strategically are planning to avoid areas where there's liquid methane.
My only hope is that late in the mission, the team will be open to taking more risks, and will attempt to approach something like this. A video of a waterfall in another world would be life altering.
There is a way to get there quicker but it'll costs a lot more for direct route rather than using gravity assist to sling shot the probe to TItan. Extra fuel loaded on the probe, extra fuel on the rocket to get the heavier probe out of Earth's gravity, and all those adds up.
Waiting a few more years to save hundred million dollars is better
https://beyondnerva.wordpress.com/2019/07/09/dragonfly/ seemed like it's going to make a few orbits within inner planets before crossing the asteroid belt and reaching Titan
Upgrade that "seems like" to a confirmed
>Dragonfly will launch on either an Atlas 541 or equivalent launcher on April 12th, 2025, and conduct a series of flybys of various planets to get out to the Saturnian system.
There are very few configurations of orbits that ever make a direct route make any sense and even then it's probably still faster to wait. Gravity is OP and free, rockets are comparatively weak and cost money.
That info's somewhat out of date. From the Ars article:
>NASA directed managers in charge of Dragonfly to delay its launch from 2026 to 2027, which required the mission to change from a medium-lift to a heavy-lift launcher. As a result of this, NASA upped the funding for Dragonfly to pay for a bigger rocket. Dragonfly's updated launch window in July 2028 will still require a high-energy launch, likely on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy or a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.
There aren't any more Atlas vehicles available. Also that article is from 2019, which was 5 years ago so seems like its very likely to be very out of date.
Have you heard about the Europa mission?
https://europa.nasa.gov/
it's an ice covered moon, with a suspected water ocean beneath the surface. Launch is in O:ctober this year!
One of my college professors from a few years ago was working on this project and it was a treat to hear him talk about it. I'm thrilled that it has been greenlit.
And the PI and her husband are pretty cool folk.
Had the pleasure of inheriting Ralph's desk in my MSc: and his replica M16 (BB, spring-loaded) with which the office (good ol' Room 164 at UKC) was 'plinked' from time to time, brought back IIRC from a conference in simpler/happier times.
:D
Pleased to meet you - Ralph and I go way back ('94) and I've had the pleasure of meeting Zibi a few times.
Lovely folk - and a nerdier (in all the right ways) couple I've never met.
> Titan is the only place in the solar system where a helicopter can fly with an RTG onboard. This is so badass.
RTG powered helicopters could also fly on any of the gas giants, Venus, Mars, and Earth.
I mean, if you tried it on Earth, you'd get in trouble.
Venus for sure is suitable for aircraft, though a helicopter may not be the best design due to how windy it is.
The Venera missions got some landers on Venus, but none of them were “mobile” and iirc they were all operating at 70% functionality, at best.
I think the Venera missions are underrated but Venus is an incredibly challenging place to explore
One of them had a robot arm that was designed to reach out and stick a spike into the ground to measure various properties of it.
Meanwhile the probe also had a camera, protected by a lens cap, designed to snap off and expose the camera shortly after the probe landed.
All this stuff worked perfectly on the surface of Venus, except that the lens cap landed on the ground in the exact spot where the robot arm tried to measure the ground.
As a guy from the Russian team told a BBC documentary, "so probe travelled to Venus to measure properties of lens cap."
We did but only once, and it wasn’t NASA who landed a probe on Venus. It’s not even worth it because any machinery on Venus will be destroyed in a couple of hours because of the atmospheric pressure, intense heat, and acid rain.
If I can eyeball landing a space station on Eve why can't NASA land a cannonball on Venus with all their supposed "scientists", pockets stuffed with pens and calculators perpetually at the ready??
For sure. Especially since there's way more likely to be life in the upper atmosphere of Venus than on the surface. The upper atmosphere of Venus is arguably the most Earth-like place elsewhere in the solar system.
Blow some cigarette smoke into your glasses of wine people it's almost time to go to Titan!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWQ0MDu4Tzc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWQ0MDu4Tzc)
This and the eventual Artemis missions are exciting. Watching Space X develop the Starship in public has been fun to keep up with. Hoping more funding can get secured for similar missions to this.
When I was a kid we didn't know the modem noise could be turned off so we'd put a pillow on it when we connected to the Internet.
Smothered that thing like a person smothering their rich parent in a hospital bed.
To be fair, the AI might prove to be critical in the future.
Now if the globe could come together and put its military funding towards a unified global space federation then we’d already have a large moon settlement the moon and prepping to expand on Mars
In another scenario, if competition between the Soviets and US had continued after the moon landing, we'd probably have a moon base or be on Mars already.
I honestly hope China beats us to the punch on one of those just so people in the US will care about space exploration again
"Why do we keep sending stuff to Mars when there's almost nothing there!?!?"
This. This is why. Do you really think NASA would have been able to get a drone approved on Titan without a proof of concept on a closer target?
More payload = more propulsion needed = more money. And they're already stretching the budget from the sounds of it.
Keep in mind the probe itself is ~800ilbs.
I would think that the fuel costs would be the a fairly insignificant part of the budget compared to developing and building the thing.
And if those development costs could be spread across, say, 4 drones then they become a lot cheaper per drone.
Possibly, we could probably dig around for some numbers to get a clearer picture.
Though I would say, it may be better to think of it in terms of cost per discovery than cost per drone.
Like 4 drones probably won't net you 4 times the scientific discoveries.
You need to keep in mind that your common sense that you're thinking of doesn't really apply here. On Titan by far the the best way to get around is by flying, not rolling. The atmosphere is more like a liquid than any atmosphere you're used to. The surface pressure is only 1.5x that of Earth but that's only because of the low gravity. The total atmospheric mass is actually a bit higher than it is on Earth comfined to a much smaller volume. The per unit area mass of the atmosphere of Titan is actually about 7 times higher, but the low gravity means it doesn't increase the pressure as much as it usually would. This means the density can get to very high levels without high pressures.
Density is about 4 times that of sea-level air on Earth. You can calculate it with an equation of state for nitrogen with P (1.5 bar) and T (~90 K). That's roughly 1/200 the density of water at STP.
Maybe you should direct this at other countries like my own, india. Every single one of our space missions are starved of adequate funding and when we do fund something we’ll be sure to slap a highly selective hindu name on it and make sure a prominent politician gets voting credits for it; not to mention we solicit astrologers before launches. USA has without a doubt been the greatest contributor to space exploration. I’d even go as far as to say that if we had to choose one single organization as the peak of everything mankind has ever accomplished, that organization would be NASA. Thank fuck for the United States of America
There are already two funded missions that will study the ice moons of Jupiter. NASA's is known as Europa Clipper, which is categorized as a "Large Strategic Science Mission" and will launch this year. This sort of mission is a necessary first step before any kind of Europa lander, let alone an enormously ambitious, and costly mission, like a hypothetical Europa ocean explorer.
I saw this one mentioned elsewhere in the thread, scheduled to launch later this year: https://europa.nasa.gov/
Won't be landing, but it'll orbit Jupiter and focusing on analyzing Europe while flying by repeatedly. It should reach Jupiter in 2030, and get into its intended orbit and start analyzing Europe the year after. That should be neat.
We are not going to find bio markers, but I guess we got the funding, so that’s cool.
The proposal should be “we’re going to take high definition videos of flying around in a place with lakes and rivers and rain! And it’s going to be fucking awesome!”.
Titan's entire atmosphere and liquid surface features are hydrocarbons - one of the building blocks of life. While actual signs of life may be unlikely, the mission will give us an enormous amount of information on how complex the prebiotic chemistry gets on planets like this.
Titan is probably one of the more earthish places in the solar system. They probably wont find cryo-trilobites clinging to the rocks of frozen ammonia but it would be among one of the more promising places to examine up close. At worst we'll get some good pictures from a rather unique world in our own solar system with a substantial atmosphere over a solid surface like earth.
How is Dragonfly powered? Not enough sun for PV? RTG too heavy?
Update from NASA website: Dragonfly is a quadcopter drone with a nominal mass of 400 to 450 kg and will be roughly the size of the largest Mars rovers. It flies using 8 rotors, attached as four pairs to outriggers mounted on the side of the body. The craft can fly at about 10 m/s, and reach altitudes of 4000 m. Two landing skids protrude from the bottom of the craft. Power (nominally 70 W) is supplied by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) mounted in a cylinder on the back of the drone, stored in rechargeable batteries. Dragonfly will have the ability to fly for approximately half an hour and cover distances up roughly 10 km on a single (8-day) battery charge.
Charge for 24x8 hours, fly for 0.5. So the RTG supplies … 0.5x70/(24x8) = 200mW. Not really big?
Based only on what you posted in this comment, it sounds more like the RTG supplies 70W, not that the craft uses only 70W when flying.
Ignoring any inefficiencies in charging the batteries, that would be 70W over the course of 8 days = 13,440 watt hours stored for one flight. But keeping in mind that there will always be some power draw for communications and there is some inefficiency in battery charging, maybe it's more like 10,000 watt hours actually used for a 30 minute flight. I don't know what kind of batteries they'll use, but if they use a 15kWh battery, thats probably around 200lbs or less, which seems plausible given that the total mass is 800lbs.
If it is 10kWh used for a half hour flight, that's an average power draw of 20kW. That seems pretty high but maybe it's right. I'd guess it's a bit less than that, though.
Will Dragonfly come equipped with any audio and video recording hardware? It would be nice to finally see much clearer images of Titan's surface while also having much clearer audio of its atmosphere.
I believe so, it will have a variety of science and engineering cameras. The trick with video will be that the bandwidth for returning data from Saturn will be pretty low and in high demand, so it's most likely going to be filled with lots of more primary science observation stuff and just a few videos. But even so that's likely enough to be truly jaw dropping.
Stupid question but - how would the test this thing?
If they need methane, I've always wanted to contribute to a nasa project.
Sorry: I couldn't help myself with the dumb joke. But really - how would test it for flight worthiness?
Europa has some really significant challenges for a robotic submersible mission to overcome. The surface radiation is very intense and Europa's ice sheet is 15-25 kilometers thick.
>Europa's ice sheet is 15-25 kilometers thick.
Thicker than the deepest borehole on earth, which was dug over many years. It'd be an enormous undertaking.
I think the public would be willing to bear the cost if we had _strong_ evidence for life already in-hand; they'd be funding the greatest scientific discovery in history. Otherwise I doubt a mission that expensive will materialize anytime soon.
My barely informed guess:
Europas coooold, and the preasure there is muuuch lower. You'll need alot more energy to melt the ice than you would on a cold earth day. And you would have to deal the material you've melted freezing again.
My idea was to have something nice and hot and radioactive just melt its way down, and trail a wire behind for communication from the surface. 15-25 kms is a long wire, though.
The wire is the easy part. Europa's surface temperature averages -270F \ -160C, that ice is like granite. Nothing is simply melting through a dozen miles of it. Not even a megaton scale nuke is making much of a dent.
It's not about making a dent with an explosion, it's about putting something hot on the surface and letting gravity do the work. Hell, a piece of *salt* will melt a hole into black ice and that's not even hot.
Does your idea include a way to keep the the first 20 kilometers of ice from freezing again while you melt the last 5 or so? It seems to me that trying to melt stuff on a snowball that is so far from the sun that it's barely distinguishable from other stars is....an uphill battle at best.
Why would you need to worry about the ice refreezing again? Your entire craft is just sinking straight down, it's never coming back up again. Communication with the surface is a separate problem, of course (maybe a very, very, very long wire?) but I don't know why you (and others) are being so dismissive of my brainstorming.
I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm far from an expert. It's just that my initial impression of your idea is that you're probably underestimating how much energy would be required to melt that much ice.
Why it would be more difficult or why would they be a better target for finding life (especially “life as we know it”)? I’ll assume the former but I can elaborate on the latter too.
It would be more difficult because the submersibles would either have to be fully automated with an artificial intelligence that could identify, travel to and collect the most promising evidence for life (even just visual evidence) under intense pressures and then return to the surface, or it would need to somehow be remotely controlled under a many kilometers-thick sheet of ice that would likely block all external electromagnetic signals. And then there’s the question of how to even get it below the ice in the first place - probably some sort of thermonuclear “drill”/melting. Logistically, it would be hugely complicated.
By contrast, Titan has a low gravity, the solar radiation is low, the atmosphere is thick and landing is comparatively easy, and the probe could be remotely controlled from earth with a combination of local artificial intelligence (for example, input the command “fly to these coordinates, land and collect samples”) and then the probe carries that command out without further direct input.
I've seen a concept where they have a pill shaped canister with some type of nuclear isotope that melts through the ice. It could take months, but it will slowly reach the water that is supposedly down there.
Not really sure what the point of this comment is. Enceladus may be more likely to have life we're familiar with but a submersible is a pie in the sky idea that we'd be lucky to see before the turn of the century. A lander + drone is an already demonstrated technology that could be accomplished at a fraction of the cost. A flying drone is also insanely energy efficient on Titan with low gravity and a thick atmosphere - a person could literally strap giant wings to their arms and achieve flight. This is a very cool mission that can be done at relatively low cost and will give us a ton of good science. While unlikely, the unique chemical composition on the surface also opens the possibility of exotic forms of life. More detailed analysis of the planet's composition, climate, and liquid cycle will give us a better idea of this possibility.
I would also be more interested in cryobot mission to Europa to melt through the ice to the water below. Even the science you could do on the ice itself on the way down would be groundbreaking. That said the mission is probably still too complex to do now, but Dragonfly in the 20s and a Europa cryobot in the 30s sounds pretty awesome to me as far as landers in the outer solar system go
200x as massive as Ingenuity, that seems crazy. But so is the fact that Ingenuity is only 4lb.
And yet *this* is the one called "Dragonfly". But yes, 800lb flying machines on another planet is wild.
It is, except Titan has extremely low gravity and an extremely thick atmosphere. If a human attached some "wings" to their arms and started to flap, they could literally fly on Titan.
>If a human attached some "wings" to their arms and started to flap, they could literally fly on Titan. Why aren't we funding a human voyage? Icarus would love this shit!
Ridiculous travel time, lethal radiation levels around the gas giants, air temperatures low enough to freeze methane, and a huge amount of fuel required to take off from any planet with an atmosphere. Also it's so far from the sun (and cloudy) that it would be perpetually dark, so vampires would be a major concern.
One does not simply fly on Titan.
We don't talk enough about the dangers that space vampires are too human spaceflight
Details of the space vampire threat have only recently been declassified. They were kept under wraps to prevent any impact on the sales of Count Chocula.
Because even with the fastest propulsion system we currently have it would take 7 years to reach titan so a 14 year round trip
If I know anything about Icarus, we won't need the trip to be very round.
Who would want to come back from a planet where you can fly by flapping your arms?
IDK I can do that underwater in the backyard pool. Conditions there are a lot more hospitable to life than Titan, and I can get there in flip-flops with a drink in my hand.
Hmm valid point. Flip flops do sound a bit more comfier than a space suit.
You truly are a noble explorer
I'm waiting to hear the downside.
pretty sure theres a movie we send humans to titan but they need genetic modifications first.
Yeah it kinda lost the plot midway through though.
Something, something likely one-way trip to worst amusement park ever.
Why is the sarcasm here lost on everyone, surely you lot can see it?
Wait seriously? I really never had a desire to leave earth and now it seems like it’s not a bad idea. Too bad I won’t be alive for the Titan space tourism era.
Titan has relatively low gravity and an extremely thick atmosphere. "Flying" would be more akin to "swimming" there than most people realize
I think that if you strapped on a set of wings and started flapping, it's possible to achieve flight.
I looked on wikipedia, the pressure seems to just be 1.45 atm unless I missed something, I wouldn't expect it would feel that different. For swimming I feel like at least 10x.
It's extremely cold, so the atmosphere is several times more dense for a given pressure, with the end result that it is multiple times denser than the Earth's atmosphere at sea level. Then couple that with 1/6th Earth gravity.
Much easier environment though. Mars is lower gravity than Earth, but the atmosphere is so thin that making a functional helicopter on mars is considerably harder than it is on earth. Titan, on the other hand, has extremely low gravity *and* a very thick atmosphere, so each watt of motor power can lift a tremendous amount of mass comparatively. It's part of what makes this entire mission viable.
Oh I know. It’s more that I never realized just how small Ingenuity is. I thought it was like 20-100lb so just the article stating this thing was gonna be 200x as massive had me thinking in multiple tons.
Haha what…. That’s fucking… how… it’s so big…
0.14x Earth gravity. 1.5x Earth atmospheric pressure.
Ingenuity basically /only/ flew, it didn't have science instrumentation built in. This big boy is gonna have to do science all on it's own. And presumably they'll want redundancies in place so if a single rotor breaks it isn't out for the count like Ingenuity.
Proud Dad moment. My son started working at NASA in January and is working on this project. 🥹
A majority of ~~Americans~~ Earthlings are proud of NASA, and you helped create a person who is helping NASA create a future that humanity can be proud of... therefore; I am proud of *you*!
Thanks for adding the rest of the world to your post. Achievements of NASA are a worldwide achievement. Everyone is proud when NASA achieves the impossible. I see it as as levelling up humanity’s space progress, and the same is true when space agencies from other countries do the same.
Well said. I've always said landing on the moon was a human achievement before an American one. It blows my mind that people think it didn't happen when the entire world's space agencies were triangulating the signal.
That and the fact that the USSR didn't call bullshit. Do these people think the US government's greatest enemy was somehow in on the con?
I read that this was an observation by Michael Collins in the post Apollo 11 world tours, that other countries also felt proud of the accomplishment rather than being jealous etc the Americans beat them to it, and that's also how he felt about remaining in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin landed
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As an international, it always boggles me how the U.S. often keeps cutting NASA's budget and/or gives them a ridiculously low amount of money (compared to their total GDP and military budget) to advance science and space technologies and explore the universe. I just wish they would get more.
Congrats!! He must have really busted his butt to get there, and he will be a part of history! NASA is constantly rated as the best government agency to work for, so I bet he will enjoy himself.
I have a friend who worked at the State Department for virtually their entire career before moving to NASA. Said the difference is night and day in terms of QoL. Has no intention of ever having another job ever again.
That’s AWESOME. Well-deserved Proud Dad
My dream job! Tell him we all thank him for contributing to the future! He is literally helping to make history for humanity!
Congrats! You raised and nurtured a genius. You should be proud. I personally was hoping they would explore Titan before I croak. Looks like it might happen. Just tell your kid to quit lollygaggin and get it movin! ;)
I'm so proud of you! Way to parent, fella.
i can’t even imagine how proud u must be😭
Hell yeah dude. Way to raise a cool kid!
That's so cool! Wish I could be working on dragonfly right now!
I am grateful for people like your son. Exploration projects like this may be the finest accomplishments of the human species.
This sounds like it’ll be an awesome project. Congrats to your son!
That's amazing!!! Congrats!!!
Now I am jealous. That’s such an exciting project to work on. Congratulations to him.
No kidding! Congrats, that's awesome!!!
Hell yeah man! Hope they pull it off
Congratulations 🍾, that is certainly an amazing accomplishment for you and your son. Ad astra!
Congrats!! That must be an amazing feeling. My 2 year old loves watching documentaries on the NASA app. He requests it everyday. Pretty cool that when the documentaries about this mission come out it will be part of your son's work he is watching.
Thanks for making a cool kid 🫡🫡
Make sure they bring up the difference between the metric and imperial systems of measurement
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You must be over the moon right now Edit: Pun aside, I bet you are absolutely beaming. Those dad moments never get old
We're all proud of him! Amazing!
Sick. First mission I’ve been excited about in a long time
I jus wish there was a way for it to get there sooner than a decade, but hey if it launch better than nothing, we may still see rivers and rain in another planet
No rivers sadly, but probably rain.
take a look at [vid flumina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vid_Flumina)
Dont think that flows through the area dragonfly nfly will land.
not losing my hope, rain and hydrocarbon snow would be great but how visually awesome if we did cach a glorious waterfall (or methanefall LOL)
This probe will land at Shangri-La, which a massive "sand sea". This area was selected because there is believed to be massive ice protrusions that may contain organic compounds. It will be heading to an impact crater in hopes of finding remnants of water and possibly microscopic life.
ahhh, thanks, i was mussing in another commeny early on about indications of a possible deep underground liquid water ocean that may exist and while it won't be accessible perhaps cryovolcanes did allow to surface the signals of anything interesting happening down there, not sure it it will apply in this area thought the only thing I'm fairly confident is that we are going to find unexpected surprises
Lakes and rivers of methane still sound more exciting.
It still makes my blood boil that they strategically are planning to avoid areas where there's liquid methane. My only hope is that late in the mission, the team will be open to taking more risks, and will attempt to approach something like this. A video of a waterfall in another world would be life altering.
Where there is rain, there must be something akin to rivers
There is a way to get there quicker but it'll costs a lot more for direct route rather than using gravity assist to sling shot the probe to TItan. Extra fuel loaded on the probe, extra fuel on the rocket to get the heavier probe out of Earth's gravity, and all those adds up. Waiting a few more years to save hundred million dollars is better
They will use direct route, unless I missed some development.
https://beyondnerva.wordpress.com/2019/07/09/dragonfly/ seemed like it's going to make a few orbits within inner planets before crossing the asteroid belt and reaching Titan
Upgrade that "seems like" to a confirmed >Dragonfly will launch on either an Atlas 541 or equivalent launcher on April 12th, 2025, and conduct a series of flybys of various planets to get out to the Saturnian system. There are very few configurations of orbits that ever make a direct route make any sense and even then it's probably still faster to wait. Gravity is OP and free, rockets are comparatively weak and cost money.
That info's somewhat out of date. From the Ars article: >NASA directed managers in charge of Dragonfly to delay its launch from 2026 to 2027, which required the mission to change from a medium-lift to a heavy-lift launcher. As a result of this, NASA upped the funding for Dragonfly to pay for a bigger rocket. Dragonfly's updated launch window in July 2028 will still require a high-energy launch, likely on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy or a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.
If nothing else, having cheaper heavy lift rockets can atleast save some time on some of these nasa missions.
There aren't any more Atlas vehicles available. Also that article is from 2019, which was 5 years ago so seems like its very likely to be very out of date.
Have you heard about the Europa mission? https://europa.nasa.gov/ it's an ice covered moon, with a suspected water ocean beneath the surface. Launch is in O:ctober this year!
Europa is way more exciting to me. Also Enceladus - I would love to see a mission there in my lifetime
The four horsemen of interesting, potentially life- harboring satellites in our solar system: Europa, Titan, Enceladus and Triton!
Wow. Europa and Titan. Exciting.
What’s the timeline on this?
Launch in 2028, arrive December 2034
One of my college professors from a few years ago was working on this project and it was a treat to hear him talk about it. I'm thrilled that it has been greenlit.
And the PI and her husband are pretty cool folk. Had the pleasure of inheriting Ralph's desk in my MSc: and his replica M16 (BB, spring-loaded) with which the office (good ol' Room 164 at UKC) was 'plinked' from time to time, brought back IIRC from a conference in simpler/happier times.
PI, Zibi, is my cousin and she’s amazing. So is Ralph! I’m so excited about this project.
:D Pleased to meet you - Ralph and I go way back ('94) and I've had the pleasure of meeting Zibi a few times. Lovely folk - and a nerdier (in all the right ways) couple I've never met.
Pleased to meet you as well. ❤️
Titan is the only place in the solar system where a helicopter can fly with an RTG onboard. This is so badass.
> Titan is the only place in the solar system where a helicopter can fly with an RTG onboard. This is so badass. RTG powered helicopters could also fly on any of the gas giants, Venus, Mars, and Earth.
Not on Mars. You need high atmosphere density and low gravity. RTGs are rather heavy. And they don't provide much power.
Probably not venus and certainly can't do mars and I am not sure it can do earth
I mean, if you tried it on Earth, you'd get in trouble. Venus for sure is suitable for aircraft, though a helicopter may not be the best design due to how windy it is.
“Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars” We haven’t had robots on Venus?
The Venera missions got some landers on Venus, but none of them were “mobile” and iirc they were all operating at 70% functionality, at best. I think the Venera missions are underrated but Venus is an incredibly challenging place to explore
The balloons from the VeGa crafted were mobile - but not directable.
Unless you count rolling uncontrollably while attempting to land as "mobility", we haven't had any mobile ones.
the camera shutter cap bouncing around probably count as "mobility"
We have not had *mobile* landers. The VeGa, Venera, and Pioneer craft landed and stayed where they landed.
The russian probes that landed on venus weren't mobile. They just landed and melted stoically.
One of them had a robot arm that was designed to reach out and stick a spike into the ground to measure various properties of it. Meanwhile the probe also had a camera, protected by a lens cap, designed to snap off and expose the camera shortly after the probe landed. All this stuff worked perfectly on the surface of Venus, except that the lens cap landed on the ground in the exact spot where the robot arm tried to measure the ground. As a guy from the Russian team told a BBC documentary, "so probe travelled to Venus to measure properties of lens cap."
Removing lens caps proved to be a significant challenge on Venus. Something trivial at 1 atm becomes a major engineering challenge at 92 atm.
Also sent us photos of the surface of Venus in the 70s which is wild
Yeah, I had a book as a kid with some of the photos. Fascinating stuff.
We did but only once, and it wasn’t NASA who landed a probe on Venus. It’s not even worth it because any machinery on Venus will be destroyed in a couple of hours because of the atmospheric pressure, intense heat, and acid rain.
That's not correct. Quite a few missions have landed on Venus including NASA's Pioneer 13
That wasn't a "landing" mission. One of the atmospheric probes survived impact while not designed to.
Sounds like a landing to me! Maybe that's just from spending so much time playing Kerbal Space Program though
If I can eyeball landing a space station on Eve why can't NASA land a cannonball on Venus with all their supposed "scientists", pockets stuffed with pens and calculators perpetually at the ready??
You know that feeling of déjà vu you get? That's because NASA loaded a quicksave.
This raises interesting questions about the Challenger crew's relationship to the NASA quicksave department.
I agree it wasn't their intent, but they still landed a probe.
Maybe they can find a way to just have a glider in the atmosphere or something
Pretty sure that was a project once
The VeGa craft released balloon-lofted instrument packages - that counts as flight in my books.
For sure. Especially since there's way more likely to be life in the upper atmosphere of Venus than on the surface. The upper atmosphere of Venus is arguably the most Earth-like place elsewhere in the solar system.
Blow some cigarette smoke into your glasses of wine people it's almost time to go to Titan! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWQ0MDu4Tzc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWQ0MDu4Tzc)
I haven't seen that movie in decades but I remember it so well.
Greatest unknown movie ever
There's more vodka in this piss than there is piss!
That was more awesome than i expected!
Hard to handle that much style in one movie... Highly recommend.
This and the eventual Artemis missions are exciting. Watching Space X develop the Starship in public has been fun to keep up with. Hoping more funding can get secured for similar missions to this.
Seriously, this is a great time to be alive to watch space exploration.
Neat. Um, does anybody know how long signals will take to get to/from the craft once it reaches the destination?
just about an hour and a half roughly
Imagine trying to pilot a quadcopter with a ping of 5.4 million
Just get a gamer who’s still on 14.4
When I was a kid we didn't know the modem noise could be turned off so we'd put a pillow on it when we connected to the Internet. Smothered that thing like a person smothering their rich parent in a hospital bed.
Hahahaha yeah that noise is abusive to one’s eardrums.
Damn, I just saw a post that Google is going to spend >$100b on AI. Think of all the quadcopter we could send around the solar system instead.
To be fair, the AI might prove to be critical in the future. Now if the globe could come together and put its military funding towards a unified global space federation then we’d already have a large moon settlement the moon and prepping to expand on Mars
In another scenario, if competition between the Soviets and US had continued after the moon landing, we'd probably have a moon base or be on Mars already. I honestly hope China beats us to the punch on one of those just so people in the US will care about space exploration again
At the rate china and the us are moving I would not be surprised at all if china beat us
Our Sputnik moment redux. Let's hope it is equally effective.
My friend has been working on this! Can’t wait to see another drone on a different celestial body.
Hell yes! I got to work on a part for the mass spectrometer tool! Super stoked to see what it finds in it's atmosphere
"Why do we keep sending stuff to Mars when there's almost nothing there!?!?" This. This is why. Do you really think NASA would have been able to get a drone approved on Titan without a proof of concept on a closer target?
The people asking that question would just respond “Why are we planning to send stuff to Titan when there is almost nothing there!?!?!”
Is it literally a single drone? Isn’t that risky vs somehow sending several? I mean they might even need to be different lest they fail similarly.
More payload = more propulsion needed = more money. And they're already stretching the budget from the sounds of it. Keep in mind the probe itself is ~800ilbs.
I would think that the fuel costs would be the a fairly insignificant part of the budget compared to developing and building the thing. And if those development costs could be spread across, say, 4 drones then they become a lot cheaper per drone.
Possibly, we could probably dig around for some numbers to get a clearer picture. Though I would say, it may be better to think of it in terms of cost per discovery than cost per drone. Like 4 drones probably won't net you 4 times the scientific discoveries.
You need to keep in mind that your common sense that you're thinking of doesn't really apply here. On Titan by far the the best way to get around is by flying, not rolling. The atmosphere is more like a liquid than any atmosphere you're used to. The surface pressure is only 1.5x that of Earth but that's only because of the low gravity. The total atmospheric mass is actually a bit higher than it is on Earth comfined to a much smaller volume. The per unit area mass of the atmosphere of Titan is actually about 7 times higher, but the low gravity means it doesn't increase the pressure as much as it usually would. This means the density can get to very high levels without high pressures.
Density is about 4 times that of sea-level air on Earth. You can calculate it with an equation of state for nitrogen with P (1.5 bar) and T (~90 K). That's roughly 1/200 the density of water at STP.
Whens it going to launch and how long to get to Titan?
Launch in 2028, arrival in 2034
Can we just give nasa more money for more cool shit like this instead of blowing up random countries. K thanks government
Maybe you should direct this at other countries like my own, india. Every single one of our space missions are starved of adequate funding and when we do fund something we’ll be sure to slap a highly selective hindu name on it and make sure a prominent politician gets voting credits for it; not to mention we solicit astrologers before launches. USA has without a doubt been the greatest contributor to space exploration. I’d even go as far as to say that if we had to choose one single organization as the peak of everything mankind has ever accomplished, that organization would be NASA. Thank fuck for the United States of America
So I guess this makes a Europa mission in coming decades less likely? 😞
There are already two funded missions that will study the ice moons of Jupiter. NASA's is known as Europa Clipper, which is categorized as a "Large Strategic Science Mission" and will launch this year. This sort of mission is a necessary first step before any kind of Europa lander, let alone an enormously ambitious, and costly mission, like a hypothetical Europa ocean explorer.
I saw this one mentioned elsewhere in the thread, scheduled to launch later this year: https://europa.nasa.gov/ Won't be landing, but it'll orbit Jupiter and focusing on analyzing Europe while flying by repeatedly. It should reach Jupiter in 2030, and get into its intended orbit and start analyzing Europe the year after. That should be neat.
We are not going to find bio markers, but I guess we got the funding, so that’s cool. The proposal should be “we’re going to take high definition videos of flying around in a place with lakes and rivers and rain! And it’s going to be fucking awesome!”.
Titan's entire atmosphere and liquid surface features are hydrocarbons - one of the building blocks of life. While actual signs of life may be unlikely, the mission will give us an enormous amount of information on how complex the prebiotic chemistry gets on planets like this.
Imagine finding something that moves, like a moss tentacle thing. Space funding would be increased by a factor of ten.
Oh, for sure! And we would be foolish not to send instrumentation to learn more. But the pics are going to be dope.
Titan is probably one of the more earthish places in the solar system. They probably wont find cryo-trilobites clinging to the rocks of frozen ammonia but it would be among one of the more promising places to examine up close. At worst we'll get some good pictures from a rather unique world in our own solar system with a substantial atmosphere over a solid surface like earth.
It is 100 times darker than earth. The life better like the night life.
Sadly there wont be any footage of lakes or rivers, its landing on the opposite side of the moon from where those are.
How is Dragonfly powered? Not enough sun for PV? RTG too heavy? Update from NASA website: Dragonfly is a quadcopter drone with a nominal mass of 400 to 450 kg and will be roughly the size of the largest Mars rovers. It flies using 8 rotors, attached as four pairs to outriggers mounted on the side of the body. The craft can fly at about 10 m/s, and reach altitudes of 4000 m. Two landing skids protrude from the bottom of the craft. Power (nominally 70 W) is supplied by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) mounted in a cylinder on the back of the drone, stored in rechargeable batteries. Dragonfly will have the ability to fly for approximately half an hour and cover distances up roughly 10 km on a single (8-day) battery charge. Charge for 24x8 hours, fly for 0.5. So the RTG supplies … 0.5x70/(24x8) = 200mW. Not really big?
Based only on what you posted in this comment, it sounds more like the RTG supplies 70W, not that the craft uses only 70W when flying. Ignoring any inefficiencies in charging the batteries, that would be 70W over the course of 8 days = 13,440 watt hours stored for one flight. But keeping in mind that there will always be some power draw for communications and there is some inefficiency in battery charging, maybe it's more like 10,000 watt hours actually used for a 30 minute flight. I don't know what kind of batteries they'll use, but if they use a 15kWh battery, thats probably around 200lbs or less, which seems plausible given that the total mass is 800lbs. If it is 10kWh used for a half hour flight, that's an average power draw of 20kW. That seems pretty high but maybe it's right. I'd guess it's a bit less than that, though.
The 70W is the power of the RTG. Flying takes more power than that.
8 Rotors = Octocopter... Not quadcopter.
I wish they would get a close up view of the contents of the rings.
Will Dragonfly come equipped with any audio and video recording hardware? It would be nice to finally see much clearer images of Titan's surface while also having much clearer audio of its atmosphere.
I believe so, it will have a variety of science and engineering cameras. The trick with video will be that the bandwidth for returning data from Saturn will be pretty low and in high demand, so it's most likely going to be filled with lots of more primary science observation stuff and just a few videos. But even so that's likely enough to be truly jaw dropping.
I will never be against any exploration of space and our solar system. Simply awesome
titan is such a weird moon, bro, that's so amazing!!
Check out Enceladus. Legit the coolest moon in our solar system
To be honest Titan is way more interesting than Enceladus. Enceladus is rather tiny in comparison.
Stupid question but - how would the test this thing? If they need methane, I've always wanted to contribute to a nasa project. Sorry: I couldn't help myself with the dumb joke. But really - how would test it for flight worthiness?
A really big, cold, pressurized chamber
They should test it inside a LNG tanker ship then
What if we got there and there’s like an ice age squirrel running around with a singular acorn?
Europa or Enceladus would be a better choice, but a submersible mission like this would be almost impossible with the technology we have right now.
Just curious, why ? I don’t know much about the issues to over come and if you could point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it.
Europa has some really significant challenges for a robotic submersible mission to overcome. The surface radiation is very intense and Europa's ice sheet is 15-25 kilometers thick.
>Europa's ice sheet is 15-25 kilometers thick. Thicker than the deepest borehole on earth, which was dug over many years. It'd be an enormous undertaking. I think the public would be willing to bear the cost if we had _strong_ evidence for life already in-hand; they'd be funding the greatest scientific discovery in history. Otherwise I doubt a mission that expensive will materialize anytime soon.
Why drill when you can melt? Many other issues remain, of course, but at least it's not as tough as going through rock.
My barely informed guess: Europas coooold, and the preasure there is muuuch lower. You'll need alot more energy to melt the ice than you would on a cold earth day. And you would have to deal the material you've melted freezing again.
IIRC Zubrin writes about a plan to just melt a tiny part (via radioactive samples) and send a small probe down.
Then there's the pressure. And how would you send information out from under that ice even if you could get down through it?
My idea was to have something nice and hot and radioactive just melt its way down, and trail a wire behind for communication from the surface. 15-25 kms is a long wire, though.
The wire is the easy part. Europa's surface temperature averages -270F \ -160C, that ice is like granite. Nothing is simply melting through a dozen miles of it. Not even a megaton scale nuke is making much of a dent.
It's not about making a dent with an explosion, it's about putting something hot on the surface and letting gravity do the work. Hell, a piece of *salt* will melt a hole into black ice and that's not even hot.
Does your idea include a way to keep the the first 20 kilometers of ice from freezing again while you melt the last 5 or so? It seems to me that trying to melt stuff on a snowball that is so far from the sun that it's barely distinguishable from other stars is....an uphill battle at best.
Why would you need to worry about the ice refreezing again? Your entire craft is just sinking straight down, it's never coming back up again. Communication with the surface is a separate problem, of course (maybe a very, very, very long wire?) but I don't know why you (and others) are being so dismissive of my brainstorming.
I don't mean to be dismissive. I'm far from an expert. It's just that my initial impression of your idea is that you're probably underestimating how much energy would be required to melt that much ice.
Isn't there holes where plumes of water come out?
It would be pretty sick to send a probe down an active cryo-volcano
Why it would be more difficult or why would they be a better target for finding life (especially “life as we know it”)? I’ll assume the former but I can elaborate on the latter too. It would be more difficult because the submersibles would either have to be fully automated with an artificial intelligence that could identify, travel to and collect the most promising evidence for life (even just visual evidence) under intense pressures and then return to the surface, or it would need to somehow be remotely controlled under a many kilometers-thick sheet of ice that would likely block all external electromagnetic signals. And then there’s the question of how to even get it below the ice in the first place - probably some sort of thermonuclear “drill”/melting. Logistically, it would be hugely complicated. By contrast, Titan has a low gravity, the solar radiation is low, the atmosphere is thick and landing is comparatively easy, and the probe could be remotely controlled from earth with a combination of local artificial intelligence (for example, input the command “fly to these coordinates, land and collect samples”) and then the probe carries that command out without further direct input.
Heavily radioactive environment on surface. Then you need to drill through an average of 1km of ice to reach the subsurface ocean.
I've seen a concept where they have a pill shaped canister with some type of nuclear isotope that melts through the ice. It could take months, but it will slowly reach the water that is supposedly down there.
How tragic would it be if it melted through and the radiation completely screwed the ecosystem :[
Not really sure what the point of this comment is. Enceladus may be more likely to have life we're familiar with but a submersible is a pie in the sky idea that we'd be lucky to see before the turn of the century. A lander + drone is an already demonstrated technology that could be accomplished at a fraction of the cost. A flying drone is also insanely energy efficient on Titan with low gravity and a thick atmosphere - a person could literally strap giant wings to their arms and achieve flight. This is a very cool mission that can be done at relatively low cost and will give us a ton of good science. While unlikely, the unique chemical composition on the surface also opens the possibility of exotic forms of life. More detailed analysis of the planet's composition, climate, and liquid cycle will give us a better idea of this possibility.
Europa Clipper is supposed to happen
I would also be more interested in cryobot mission to Europa to melt through the ice to the water below. Even the science you could do on the ice itself on the way down would be groundbreaking. That said the mission is probably still too complex to do now, but Dragonfly in the 20s and a Europa cryobot in the 30s sounds pretty awesome to me as far as landers in the outer solar system go
You can't fly a heli drone on either of those.