Nasa advances missions to land flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet

NASA’S newest mission will either land a quadcopter-like spacecraft on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan or collect a sample from the nucleus of a comet.

The two proposals were selected from a group of 12 submitted to the New Frontiers programme. The first, called Dragonfly, would be an unprecedented project to send a flying robot to an alien moon. The quadcopter would be able to fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart to study the landscape on Titan. This large, cold moon of Saturn features a thick atmosphere and lakes and rivers of liquid methane, and scientists believe that a watery ocean may lurk beneath its frozen crust.

It’s “an environment that we know has the ingredients for life,” said lead investigator Elizabeth Turtle, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. With Dragonfly, “we can evaluate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed.”

The Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return mission would circle back to the comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft from 2014 to 2016. After rendezvousing with the Mount Fuji-size space rock, CAESAR would suck up a sample from its surface and send it back to Earth, where it would arrive in November 2038.

Nasa has sampled a comet before; the Stardust mission collected dust from a comet’s gassy outer envelope. But this would be the first mission to return material from a comet’s icy surface.

“Comets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they’re also among the most poorly understood,” said Cornell University researcher Steve Squyres, the lead investigator for the mission. — Washington Post