NASA's Dragonfly drone is headed for Saturn's largest moon, Titan, an active, icy world with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere and underground liquid-water oceans, where the skies rain methane to fill lakes and flowing rivers on the surface. Dragonfly is poised to get an up-close look at all of it, and possibly discover clues to the origins of life on the moon.
Dragonfly will be NASA's first interplanetary rotorcraft-lander probe outfitted with a full suite of scientific instruments, and will be capable of flying several miles between geological points of interest on Titan's surface. Currently being designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, Dragonfly is part of NASA's New Frontiers program, which includes the OSIRIS-REx probe's study of the asteroid Bennu, Juno, sent to orbit Jupiter, and the New Horizons probe that performed a fly-by of Pluto and is now studying the Kuiper Belt.
Source: www.space.com
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