Dragonfly :)

Like it's insect namesake, Dragonfly will have four counter-rotating rotors to enable it to fly in Titan's thick atmosphere while exploring Saturn's giant moon. Awesome mission as followup to Cassini, the most successful mission IMHO, that NASA has ever done.



Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander mission – part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program – designed to take advantage of Titan’s environment to sample materials and determine surface composition in different geologic settings. This revolutionary mission concept includes the capability to explore diverse locations to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, to investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and even to search for chemical signatures that could indicate water-based and/or hydrocarbon-based life. Credit: Johns Hopkins APL

Titan’s dense atmosphere offers a key benefit to scientific exploration, especially combined with its low gravity (1/7th of Earth’s) and frigid temperatures (-290 Fahrenheit, -179 Celsius, 94 Kelvin). These three features will help Dragonfly stay easily aloft above Titan’s surface and to fly faster and farther with little energy. In fact, Dragonfly is expected to fly more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) over a nearly three-year mission — that’s almost double the distance traveled by all the Mars rovers combined.

How cool is that? :)

These three views of Titan from the Cassini spacecraft illustrate how different the same place can look in different wavelengths of light. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Read the SciencdDaily piece in it's entirety, it's the smart thing to do. :)