{"id":14112,"date":"2017-12-20T17:39:34","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T09:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/titan-drone-comet-sampler-picked-as-finalists-for-nasa-mission\/"},"modified":"2017-12-20T17:39:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T09:39:34","slug":"titan-drone-comet-sampler-picked-as-finalists-for-nasa-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/titan-drone-comet-sampler-picked-as-finalists-for-nasa-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Titan drone, comet sampler picked as finalists for NASA mission"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the Dragonfly mission to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA has narrowed its choices for a new billion-dollar robotic space mission: A nuclear-powered quadcopter to explore the hazy landscape of Saturn\u2019s largest moon Titan, or a probe to scoop up a piece of a comet and return it to Earth.<\/p>\n

The space agency announced its selections Wednesday, picking two concepts from 12 proposals submitted by scientists earlier this year in a competition to win government funding to build and launch a mission by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n

The teams behind the Dragonfly mission to Titan and the CAESAR mission to comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will receive $4 million from NASA over the next year to refine their plans and designs, setting the stage for NASA to decide in July 2019 which mission will go forward to launch.<\/p>\n

The winner will become the fourth mission in NASA\u2019s New Frontiers program, a series of science-driven solar system probes cost-capped at about $1 billion that has so far produced the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno orbiter at Jupiter, and the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the way to snag a sample of an asteroid and bring it back to Earth.<\/p>\n

The Dragonfly mission would reach Titan in 2034, descend through its thick atmosphere and deploy a rotorcraft to make multiple hops across the moon\u2019s alien surface over a two-year mission, surveying dune fields and rivers and lakes of liquid methane and ethane in search of the building blocks of life.<\/p>\n

\u201cTitan is a unique ocean world,\u201d said Elizabeth Turtle, principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. \u201cIt has a dense atmosphere, with very complex hydrocarbons produced in the atmosphere and littering the surface.<\/p>\n

Most of what scientists know about Titan came from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft and a European Space Agency probe named Huygens, which made the first landing on Saturn\u2019s largest moon in 2005.<\/p>\n

Cassini made 127 flybys of Titan in its 13-year tour of Saturn before its mission ended in September, unveiling the moon\u2019s surface for the first time to see oceans with rugged shorelines, streams and sand dunes. NASA\u2019s Voyager probes could not see through Titan\u2019s hazy veneer when they flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has lakes and seas of liquid methane and ethane, and rivers that flow across the surface, and what we\u2019re excited to continue with this mission concept is to build upon the Cassini-Huygens exploration of Titan with Dragonfly, which is a rotorcraft lander,\u201d Turtle said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnique about Titan is that it\u2019s got a liquid cycle very much like Earth\u2019s water cycle, but it\u2019s with methane,\u201d said Peter Bedini, Dragonfly project manager at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where the craft would be designed and built.<\/p>\n

But many questions about Titan remain unanswered. It\u2019s the solar system\u2019s only moon with a dense atmosphere \u2014 made primarily of nitrogen and methane \u2014 but Titan\u2019s orange haze hides its surface from conventional cameras.<\/p>\n

Cassini peered through the atmosphere with an imaging radar to reveal huge land masses, oceans and other surface features.<\/p>\n

But Cassini and Huygens \u201cleft us with a lot of fundamental unknowns,\u201d Turtle said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know the basic composition of the solid surface on Titan. We have some information from spectral characteristics from orbit. We have some information from the Huygens probe, but neither (Cassini nor Huygens) was designed or able to do detailed measurements of the kind of rich organic chemistry that we know is occurring there. So Dragonfly is designed to go back to build on what we\u2019ve learned from Cassini-Huygens and answer the fundamental unknowns that remain about Titan.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dragonfly drone would carry cameras, drills, seismic and weather sensors, and spectrometers to examine the composition of Titan\u2019s rocks and soil, collecting four basic types of measurements. A plutonium power source, known as a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or MMRTG, would charge the craft\u2019s batteries to power the instruments, eight electrically-driven rotors and a high-gain antenna to beam data directly to Earth.<\/p>\n

Dragonfly\u2019s mobility is a key advantage, officials said, allowing it to travel tens to hundreds of kilometers across Titan, Turtle said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this way, we can evaluate how far pre-biotic chemistry has progressed in an environment that we know had the ingredients for life \u2014 for water-based life, or potentially even hydrocarbon-based life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you first hear the high concept of Dragonfly, it might seem a little ambitious, or maybe even a little audacious,\u201d Bedini said in a presentation earlier this year.<\/p>\n

A flying drone would allow scientists to explore a wider range on Titan, first touching down in a relatively flat region before departing to more interesting \u2014 and hazardous \u2014 locations to land and conduct observations for weeks at a time, then moving on again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could take a lander and we could plop it down on Titan, and we could take these four measurements at one place, and we would significantly increase our understanding of Titan and \u2026 bodies like it and other ocean worlds,\u201d Bedini said. \u201cHowever, we can multiply the value of this mission if we add aerial mobility because now we can look at this very diverse surface that is Titan. It\u2019s got a variety of geologic settings. Instead of just measuring in one place, we can go to many places and increase the science return substantially.\u201d<\/p>\n

And unlike a rover on the surface, an instrumented drone would not be stopped or delayed by obstacles like rocks and steep slopes.<\/p>\n

Titan\u2019s thick atmosphere makes getting down to the ground tricky, but once there, flying a drone should be feasible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out that the easiest place in the solar system to fly a quadcopter is on Titan,\u201d Bedini said. \u201cThat\u2019s because Titan\u2019s got an atmosphere more than four times as dense as Earth, and the gravity is only one-seventh that of Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other New Frontiers finalist \u2014 the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return mission, or CAESAR \u2014 would embark on a round-trip journey to comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, revisiting the same comet explored by the European Space Agency\u2019s Rosetta mission from 2014 through 2016.<\/p>\n

The CAESAR mission concept is led by Steve Squyres, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and lead scientist for NASA\u2019s Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.<\/p>\n

After launching in the mid-2020s, CAESAR would depart toward comet 67P powered by solar-electric thrusters and armed with an extendable collector to capture at least 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces, of material from its icy nucleus.<\/p>\n

Built by Orbital ATK, the spacecraft would bring the specimens back to Earth for scientists to analyze in ground-based labs. While NASA\u2019s Stardust mission brought back dust grains from the coma of a comet in 2006, samples from a comet\u2019s nucleus have never been returned from space.<\/p>\n

\u201cComets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they\u2019re also among the most poorly understood,\u201d Squyres said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re the most primitive building blocks of planets,\u201d he said. \u201cThey contain materials that date from the very earliest moments of solar system formation, and even before. Comets were a source of water for the Earth\u2019s oceans, and critically, they were a source of organic molecules that contributed to the origin of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the CAESAR mission at comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAESAR would approach comet 67P for touch-and-go maneuvers to retrieve two types of samples: volatile and non-volatile material.<\/p>\n

Frozen volatile compounds, like water ice, are heated when comets get close to the sun, spewing jets of dust and gas dozens of miles into space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes comets really special, what distinguishes them from every other primitive body out there, is what we call their volatile components,\u201d Squyres said. \u201cThe ices, the volatile organic compounds, just aren\u2019t present in any other kind of planetary body.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two types of samples would be separated into different chambers inside a re-entry capsule that would return to a parachute-assisted landing in Utah in November 2038.<\/p>\n

\u201cPatience is a virtue in this business,\u201d Squyres said.<\/p>\n

The return canister would be provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, based on the design employed on Japan\u2019s Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission, which landed in 2010.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, the end date of the flight is really just the beginning of the mission,\u201d Squyres said. \u201cThat\u2019s the beginning of the mission science, when those samples come back, and the science will extend for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Squyres said going back to comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will give mission planners an idea of what to expect at the destination ahead of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy going to that comet, there\u2019s an enormous amount of risk reduction that takes place because we\u2019re going to an object that we\u2019ve already got good maps of,\u201d Squyres said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason that we\u2019re going to Churyumov-Gerasimenko is that it provides us with an enormous amount of information about how to conduct our mission,\u201d he said. \u201cChuryumov-Gerasimenko has been mapped in detail by the Rosetta mission, so we are able to design our mission, our spacecraft, specifically for the conditions that we know to exist there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Squyres said he will step down as lead scientist on the Opportunity rover mission, which still operates on Mars nearly 14 years after its arrival, if NASA picks CAESAR for development and launch.<\/p>\n

Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, told reporters Wednesday he selected Dragon and CAESAR based on their scientific and technical merits.<\/p>\n

\u201cI selected these mission concepts based on their outstanding and visionary science, as well as the endorsement of our rigorous selection process that looks at both scientific and technical viability,\u201d Zurbuchen said.<\/p>\n

The 12 proposals submitted to NASA in April focused on six themes outlined by the National Academy of Sciences:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Comet Surface Sample Return<\/li>\n
  • Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return<\/li>\n
  • Ocean Worlds (Titan and\/or Enceladus)<\/li>\n
  • Saturn Probe<\/li>\n
  • Trojan Tour and Rendezvous<\/li>\n
  • Venus In Situ Explorer<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The winning mission selected in 2019 will have a cost cap of $850 million, a figure that does not include the cost of a launcher or operations, which will likely drive the project\u2019s total budget above $1 billion.<\/p>\n

    NASA is expected to pick a launch vehicle for the next New Frontiers mission in the early 2020s.<\/p>\n

    The space agency will fund further technological research on two other proposals that did not make Wednesday\u2019s cut.<\/p>\n

    A team that proposed sending a robotic mission named ELSAH to search for biosignatures at Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus will receive additional NASA funding develop ways to achieve stringent contamination controls for life detection. Scientists who worked on the VICI proposal \u2014 a twin-lander mission to Venus \u2014 will also get support in advancing technologies that can withstand the extreme pressures and temperatures at the planet\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

    Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

    Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Artist\u2019s concept of the Dragonfly mission to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan. Credit: NASA NASA has narrowed its choices for a new billion-dollar robotic space mission: A nuclear-powered quadcopter to explore the hazy landscape of Saturn\u2019s largest moon Titan, or a probe to scoop up a piece of a comet and return it to Earth. The space […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3096,3097,3098,1404,1775,3099,1861,2020],"class_list":["post-14112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-caesar","tag-comet","tag-comet-67p-churyumov-gerasimenko","tag-dragonfly","tag-electric-propulsion","tag-elizabeth-turtle","tag-jhuapl","tag-new-frontiers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}