Washington (AFP)
The US space agency said on Thursday it had decided to send a quadrocopter-like robot to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, which is larger than Mercury and looks like the early Earth.
The mission is called Dragonfly (dragonfly) and will take off in 2026, for a landing in 2034 on Titan, ten times more distant from the Sun than the Earth and particularly frozen: the average temperature is -179 ° C.
Dragonfly, with its eight rotors, will fly in Titan's sky. This will be the first time that a device will boot on another star. The drone will land and then take steps, bigger and bigger over its mission of at least two years and eight months, to analyze different parts of Titan.
The goal: to find traces of ancient life, to understand how life began.
So far, only fixed landers or rovers have been laid in the solar system, on Mars, Venus, Moon or asteroids. But the American rover Curiosity, the only one currently active on Mars, can only roll a hundred yards a day, after which he must recharge his batteries. He has traveled 20 km in seven years. Dragonfly will fly 175 km in less than three years.
Titan has oceans and liquid lakes on the surface. But it is not water: they are made of methane, made liquid by the ultra-low temperature.
"Going into this ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
The landscapes that Dragonfly will explore will be multiple: it will start with dunes similar to the dunes of Namibia, and end in the bottom of a crater where liquid water probably sank a long time ago, maybe for tens of thousands years.
"Dragonfly will explore a world filled with a wide variety of organic molecules, which are the bricks of life and could help us break into the origin of life itself," said Thomas Zurbuchen, who oversees all scientific activities from NASA.
Like the Earth, Titan has an atmosphere composed mainly of nitrogen. But on Titan, it's raining methane. And it's snowing up other organic molecules.
? 2019 AFP