In July 2028 NASA launches a car-sized, 1,000-pound nuclear drone toward Saturn's moon Titan, a six-year, $3.35 billion trip to a world where the air is four times denser than Earth's, gravity is one

In July 2028 NASA launches a car-sized, 1,000-pound nuclear drone toward Saturn's moon Titan, a six-year, $3.35 billion trip to a world where the air is four times denser than Earth's, gravity is one

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

NASA is about to try something it has never attempted: instead of another six-wheeled rover, it will fly a car-sized, plutonium-powered drone across the surface of Saturn’s largest moon. Dragonfly launches in July 2028 and reaches Titan in 2034. Here’s the strange part — Titan is one of the few places in the solar system where flying is easier than it is on Earth. The atmosphere is four times denser than ours and gravity is one-seventh as strong, so eight rotors can lift a 1,000-pound laboratory with room to spare. Over more than three years, Dragonfly will hop between dozens of sites, hunting the carbon chemistry that came before life — on a frozen world 900 million miles from the Sun.

Source: 19fortyfive.com