Nuclear-powered lander for Saturn’s moon Titan
Why In News?
- Recently, NASA is building a nuclear-powered lander to explore ‘Titan’, the largest moon of Saturn with dense atmosphere and low gravity. The lander is a part of the Dragonfly spacecraft, which will be launched by 2027.
Main Point:
- Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water.
- Titan is a major target in NASA’s quest to assess habitability and search for potential signs of life beyond Earth on worlds across the solar system.
- The lander, Dragonfly rotorcraft, is NASA’s only mission to the surface of another ocean world. Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water.
- The lander, Dragonfly rotorcraft, is NASA’s only mission to the surface of another ocean world. Titan is also thought to have a subsurface ocean of water.
- The car-sized drone, built and operated by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, will have four pairs of coaxial rotors (meaning one rotor is stacked above the other) and will slice through Titan’s dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
- It will be equipped with cameras, sensors and samplers to help examine swaths of Titan known to contain organic materials that may have come in contact with liquid water beneath the organic-rich, icy surface.
- Dragonfly’s flight systems has so far undergone four testing in the past three years at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
About Titan:
- Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second largest natural satellite in the Solar System.
- It is the only moon with a dense atmosphere, and the only known object in space other than Earth on which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface fluid has been found.
- Titan is 50% larger (in diameter) and 80% more massive than Earth’s Moon. It is the second largest moon in the solar system after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. It is bigger than the planet Mercury.
- Titan’s atmosphere is predominantly nitrogenous, with minor components causing the formation of methane and ethane clouds and heavy organonitrogen haze.
- With its liquids (both surface and subsurface) and strong nitrogen atmosphere, Titan’s methane cycle is similar to Earth’s water cycle, albeit at a much lower temperature of about 94 K (−179 °C; −290 °F).
About Saturn:
- Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the largest planet in the solar system after Jupiter.
- Titan is the largest of Saturn’s 82 moons or satellites. The conditions on Titan are very similar to those on Earth. Therefore, scientists remain curious to know about this satellite.
- Due to elements like water, methane, ammonia or stone being found in very little or no quantity, Saturn is included among the four giant planets of the solar system which are called gas giants.
- Hydrogen and helium gases are found in abundance on Saturn.
- One specialty of Saturn is its attractive rings, due to which Saturn looks very beautiful from a distance. Although apart from Saturn, rings are present in Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, but these rings are not as well equipped and complex as compared to Saturn.
Source – The Hindu
