Please join the Physics & Astronomy Department for our next Seminar Speaker Series event!

The Dragonfly Mission: Robotic Aerial Exploration of Titan's Prebiotic Chemistry and Habitability with Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, the Principal Investigator for the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission to Titan and for the Europa Imaging System (EIS) cameras on the Europa Clipper mission, and planetary scientist at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Snacks at 4:30 pm, talk begins at 4:45 pm.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the prebiotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth.

NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide-ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to sample surface materials to measure their compositions and to observe Titan's geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at a few dozen sites during a 3.3-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that may have provided key ingredients for life.