![]() ![]() ![]() This would be a less risky option, but the reward would be lower as well, Oleson said. The researchers also investigated the possibility of staying on the surface with a boat, which would probe the Titanic depths intermittently with small, instrument-laden devices called dropsondes. Additional instruments could analyze seafloor samples and image the ocean bottom, among other tasks. That science gear should include, at the bare minimum, a chemistry package that analyzes liquid samples, a surface imager, a depth sounder, a weather station and an instrument that measures the physical properties of the surrounding sea, Oleson and his team determined. ![]() A sub with an orbiter companion, by contrast, could fit the same science instrumentation into a body just 6.5 feet (2 m) long, with a weight of about 1,100 lbs. (1,500 kilograms) - to accommodate the requisite communications equipment, Oleson said. Related: Amazing Saturn photos by NASA's Cassini spacecraftĪ standalone Titan submarine would need to be big - about 20 feet (6 meters) long, with a weight (on Earth) of 3,300 lbs. Those communications could reach the sub directly from Earth or be relayed via a Titan orbiter, depending on the mission architecture. A submarine could push through liquid hydrocarbons fairly easily, Oleson said, and the stuff is transparent to radio signals, enabling communication with the craft even while it's submerged. But that's not necessarily a negative, either. That means a Titan sub wouldn't experience nearly as much pressure on its hull as a sub would at the same depth on Earth.Īnd the Titan sub would be cruising through a different medium than the ones here on Earth do. For instance, though Titan is huge for a moon, it's much smaller than Earth, sporting just 14% of our planet's gravitational pull. "What kinds of technologies are needed? What's unique about that environment?" "Is it possible?" he said during the FISO presentation. The main goal of the NIAC work was to draw up a basic engineering blueprint of a potential Titan sub, Oleson said. Those two NIAC grants, worth $100,000 and $500,000, were awarded in 20, respectively. The agency has not selected the Titan sub idea as an official mission, but Oleson and his team did get two rounds of funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which seeks to spur the development of potentially game-changing exploration ideas and technologies. If all goes according to plan, Dragonfly will land on Titan in 2034, then study the moon's complex chemistry and potential habitability at a number of different locations.Ī submarine could be the next step in Titan exploration. NASA is working on a Titan spacecraft of its own - an eight-rotor drone called Dragonfly, which is scheduled to launch in 2026. The bulk of this work was done by NASA's Cassini Saturn orbiter, but significant contributions also came from the Huygens lander, a European Space Agency-Italian Space Agency probe that touched down on Titan in January 2005. Most of what we know about Titan we've learned from the $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission, which studied Saturn and its many moons up close from 2004 through 2017. Related: The 6 most likely places for alien life in the solar system It's therefore possible that Titan hosts two completely different and separate ecosystems - a surface world of "strange life" that overlies a realm of more familiar (to us, anyway) water-reliant organisms. Titan's surface is far too cold for water to remain liquid, but scientists think the moon hosts a salty sea of the stuff deep underground, like Enceladus, Europa and a number of other solar system bodies. Those swimmers would be very different from anything that exists here on Earth, given that they'd be making a living in liquid methane or ethane rather than water. As a result, many astrobiologists view Titan as a promising potential abode for life, suggesting that native organisms could be swirling in the moon's air or swimming in its lakes and seas. In addition, Titan's thick atmosphere likely hosts complex chemistry involving organic molecules, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. For example, the giant moon is the only world beyond Earth known to host stable bodies of liquid on its surface - those seas and lakes of liquid methane and ethane, some of which are bigger than North America's Great Lakes. ![]() The only one bigger is Jupiter's Ganymede, which has Titan beat by just 75 miles (120 km).īut size isn't all that makes Titan special. At 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers) wide, Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system. ![]()
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