A sample-return mission to Saturn’s moon Titan may uncover sudden types of life and produce again chemical compounds that can not be discovered on Earth. A staff of NASA researchers is designing a mission idea that may use Titan’s lakes of methane as a supply of gasoline to energy the spacecraft’s journey again house.
Saturn’s moon Titan is a mysterious world. The second largest moon within the solar system, Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury and, subsequent to Earth, is the one place within the solar system with flowing rivers of liquid and lakes on the floor. Except these rivers and lakes maintain not water however hydrocarbons, reminiscent of methane. But Titan additionally has water — a complete ocean of it, below the moon’s frozen floor. Titan additionally has an environment wealthy in nitrogen, identical to our planet.
A staff of engineers from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has just lately acquired a $125,000 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to look into the feasibility of bringing a sample of fabric from this intriguing world to Earth. The NIAC program focuses on funding know-how that’s nowhere close to able to launch, however affords intriguing advantages for future exploration missions.
The excellent news is that to land on Titan could be a lot simpler than the seven minutes of terror of a touchdown on Mars. Titan’s ambiance is six occasions as thick because the ambiance of Earth, and would offer sufficient drag to decelerate a lander for a tender landing even with out touchdown rockets.
“We expect landing on Titan to be relatively easy,” Steven Oleson, head of the Compass Lab at Glenn, which conducts conceptual spacecraft design for NASA, mentioned in an announcement. “Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen — 1.5 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth — which can slow the lander’s velocity with an aeroshell and a parachute for a soft landing, just like astronauts returning to Earth.”
The international scientific neighborhood acquired the primary detailed take a look at Titan due to the Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017. During that point, the spacecraft carried out over 100 flybys of the planet’s largest moon. The unusual world that Cassini uncovered sparked much more scientific curiosity.
Related: Dazzling Views Show Saturn Moon Titan’s Surface Like Never Before
Scientists imagine that Titan’s subsurface water ocean may host life just like that discovered within the deepest areas of Earth’s ocean. Despite freezing floor temperatures of minus 290 levels Fahrenheit (minus 179 levels Celsius) and as much as 50% greater air stress than on Earth, the floor lakes of hydrocarbons may not be lifeless both. The life they may harbor might be very completely different from that on Earth, ruled by the carbon-rich chemistry of its environment.
Moreover, scientists learning Titan’s floor and ambiance have discovered a category of chemical compounds referred to as tholins, which might’t be discovered anyplace on Earth. These compounds, scientists imagine, may need performed a key function within the emergence of life on the younger Earth billions of years in the past.
There could be loads to search for in a pattern from Titan. And with the touchdown out of the best way, the subsequent huge problem could be to get the pattern as much as space, on its method again to Earth. For that, the Glenn staff envisions, the floor lakes of methane will turn out to be useful.
“Producing rocket fuel on Titan wouldn’t require chemical processing — you just need a pipe and a pump,” mentioned Oleson. “The methane is already in a liquid state, so it’s ready to go.”
The Compass Lab staff will now examine learn how to successfully produce liquid oxygen, to allow the gasoline to burn. One possibility is to soften Titan’s “rocks” of water ice with a nuclear warmth supply after which cut up the water.
Although the sample-return idea could by no means fly, Titan can anticipate a robotic customer quickly. Dragonfly is an eight-bladed rotorcraft scheduled to start the eight-year journey to the Saturn system in 2027.
Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
