After the huge success of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, NASA seems to be gearing up to build another flying robotic spacecraft to explore further parts of our solar system. The space agency will be sending a rotorcraft named Dragonfly to Saturn’s moon Titan with an aim to find signs of life.

Now, the Dragonfly science team has revealed its plans for the mission. They will be hunting for chemical biosignatures on Titan that might indicate life. The moon has intrigued scientists over the years, as it is thought to have a liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust.

Taking Cassini’s legacy forward

It will also expand the space agency’s ambition to hunt for life beyond our planet. Dragonfly will also investigate Titan’s methane cycle and the complex chemistry of its atmosphere and surface.

“Titan represents an explorer’s utopia,” said co-author Alex Hayes. “The science questions we have for Titan are very broad because we don’t know much about what is actually going on at the surface yet. For every question we answered during the Cassini mission’s exploration of Titan from Saturn orbit, we gained 10 new ones.”

The last probe to reach Titan was the Cassini–Huygens craft, launched in 1997. The mission was a great success in terms of the exploration of Saturn and its rings and moons. However, there’s much more to be known about the region. The Huygens probe entered Titan’s atmosphere in 2005 to take readings, but no craft has ever explored the surface of the moon yet.

Could there be life on Titan?

Titan’s weather system also interests the astronomers, and similar to our planet, it also has lakes and rain, but with methane instead of water. There’s a possibility that this methane could even have life that is chemically different from that of Earth.

“What’s so exciting to me is that we’ve made predictions about what’s going on at the local scale on the surface and how Titan works as a system,” Hayes said, “and Dragonfly’s images and measurements are going to tell us how right or wrong they are.”