Space helicopter makes NASA shortlist for Saturn mission
Western University is one step closer to Saturn after one if its projects caught the eye of NASA scientists.
The American space agency has shortlisted a plan co-led by Western and Johns Hopkins University to send a drone-like helicopter to the gas giant’s largest moon, Titan. “There’s something very simple about having a little drone flying around Titan,” Western earth sciences professor and project member Catherine Neish said in a statement.
“It’s clever in a way that people weren’t expecting and, I think, it’s audacious and exciting — and realistic.”
The quadcopter, dubbed the Dragonfly, would zip around above the surface of the far-off moon, going from site to site to analyze its chemistry, geology and potential for life.
The extraterrestrial aircraft would be a few hundred kilograms and have four sets of rotors, a novel design that’s different than other space-bound contraptions. Unlike slower moving rovers, the drone will be able to traverse hundreds of kilometres of the giant moon, measuring surface, underground and atmospheric conditions along the way.
Neish is the lone Canadian researcher on a team led by Elizabeth Turtle at Johns Hopkins University.
The Dragonfly project is one of two finalists being mulled by NASA for its next New Frontiers mission. Dragonfly is trying to beat out a project that’s hoping to grab a sample from a comet and bring it back to Earth for further study. Both projects received $4 million from NASA to sharpen their proposals by the end of 2018. By mid-2019, the space agency will choose a single mission and fund its development with $850 million. If Dragonfly is chosen, it could launch as early as 2025 and take five years or more to reach Saturn’s rings.
Titan, a moon that’s larger than the planet Mercury, isn’t easy to explore.
Its atmosphere is an orangebrown haze of methane and nitrogen that blocks probes from
There’s something very simple about having A little drone flying around titan. It’s clever in A way that people weren’t expecting.
taking high-resolution shots of its surface.
A small area of the moon was uncovered in a 2005 probe, but that’s not good enough for Neish. “It’s like landing on a London street and saying you’ve seen the whole Earth,” she said in a statement.
“I’m really interested in what Titan looks like.”
From the limited images of the moon, scientists think rivers of liquid methane and ethane lie beneath the dense atmosphere. They believe marble-sized ice pebbles fill low-lying places, a potential incubator for some life form. “The chemistry is going to be amazing, but I’m guessing it’s just this weirdly wonderful world that looks like Earth — a strange, frozen sedimentary place — but with all the wrong ingredients,” said Neish.