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https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-titan-sample-return-mission

Scientists ponder how to get samples from Saturn's weird moon Titan
By Tereza Pultarova - Senior Writer 1 day ago

Saturn's moon Titan is a tantalizing world, how difficult would it be to
bring a piece of it to Earth?

NASA envisions a potential future mission could bring a sample from
Saturn's moon Titan, powering its return flight with hydrocarbons from
the moon's surface methane lakes.

NASA envisions a potential future mission could bring a sample from
Saturn's moon Titan, powering its return flight with hydrocarbons from
the moon's surface methane lakes. (Image credit: NASA)
A sample-return mission to Saturn's moon Titan could discover unexpected
forms of life and bring back chemical compounds that cannot be found on
Earth. A team of NASA researchers is designing a mission concept that
would use Titan's lakes of methane as a source of fuel to power the
spacecraft’s trip back home.

(Did anyone around these newsgroups read Arthur Clarke's
book Imperial Earth? He believes a Titan colony can
be self funding by help power travel in Solar System.)

Saturn's moon Titan is a mysterious world. The second largest moon in
the solar system, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury and, next to
Earth, is the only place in the solar system with flowing rivers of
liquid and lakes on the surface. Except these rivers and lakes hold not
water but hydrocarbons, such as methane. But Titan also has water — an
entire ocean of it, under the moon's frozen surface. Titan also has an
atmosphere rich in nitrogen, just like our planet.

A team of engineers from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has
recently received a $125,000 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC)
grant to look into the feasibility of bringing a sample of material from
this intriguing world to Earth. The NIAC program specializes in funding
technology that is nowhere near ready to launch, but offers intriguing
benefits for future exploration missions.

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The good news is that to land on Titan would be much easier than the
seven minutes of terror of a landing on Mars. Titan's atmosphere is six
times as thick as the atmosphere of Earth, and would provide enough drag
to slow down a lander for a soft touchdown even without landing rockets.

"We expect landing on Titan to be relatively easy," Steven Oleson, head
of the Compass Lab at Glenn, which conducts conceptual spacecraft design
for NASA, said in a statement. "Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen
— 1.5 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth — which can slow the
lander's velocity with an aeroshell and a parachute for a soft landing,
just like astronauts returning to Earth."

The global scientific community got the first detailed look at Titan
thanks to the Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and
2017. During that time, the spacecraft performed over a hundred flybys
of the planet's largest moon. The strange world that Cassini uncovered
sparked even more scientific curiosity.

Related: Dazzling Views Show Saturn Moon Titan's Surface Like Never Before

Scientists believe that Titan’s subsurface water ocean could host life
similar to that found in the deepest regions of Earth's ocean. Despite
freezing surface temperatures of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179
degrees Celsius) and up to 50% higher air pressure than on Earth, the
surface lakes of hydrocarbons might not be lifeless either. The life
they might harbor could be very different from that on Earth, governed
by the carbon-rich chemistry of its surroundings.

Moreover, scientists studying Titan's surface and atmosphere have found
a class of chemical compounds called tholins, which can't be found
anywhere on Earth. These compounds, scientists believe, might have
played a key role in the emergence of life on the young Earth billions
of years ago.

There would be plenty to look for in a sample from Titan. And with the
landing out of the way, the next big challenge would be to get the
sample up to space, on its way back to Earth. For that, the Glenn team
envisions, the surface lakes of methane will come in handy.

"Producing rocket fuel on Titan wouldn't require chemical processing —
you just need a pipe and a pump," said Oleson. "The methane is already
in a liquid state, so it's ready to go."

The Compass Lab team will now investigate how to effectively produce
liquid oxygen, to enable the fuel to burn. One option is to melt Titan's
"rocks" of water ice with a nuclear heat source and then split the water.

Although the sample-return concept may never fly, Titan can expect a
robotic visitor soon. Dragonfly is an eight-bladed rotorcraft scheduled
to begin the eight-year journey to the Saturn system in 2027.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on
Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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On 5/19/2021 1:14 PM, a425couple wrote:
> from
> https://www.space.com/saturn-moon-titan-sample-return-mission
>
> Scientists ponder how to get samples from Saturn's weird moon Titan
> By Tereza Pultarova - Senior Writer 1 day ago
>
> Saturn's moon Titan is a tantalizing world, how difficult would it be to
> bring a piece of it to Earth?
>
>
> NASA envisions a potential future mission could bring a sample from
> Saturn's moon Titan, powering its return flight with hydrocarbons from
> the moon's surface methane lakes.
>
> NASA envisions a potential future mission could bring a sample from
> Saturn's moon Titan, powering its return flight with hydrocarbons from
> the moon's surface methane lakes. (Image credit: NASA)
> A sample-return mission to Saturn's moon Titan could discover unexpected
> forms of life and bring back chemical compounds that cannot be found on
> Earth. A team of NASA researchers is designing a mission concept that
> would use Titan's lakes of methane as a source of fuel to power the
> spacecraft’s trip back home.
>
> (Did anyone around these newsgroups read Arthur Clarke's
> book Imperial Earth?  He believes a Titan colony can
> be self funding by help power travel in Solar System.)
>
and this:
https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/dragonfly-drone-to-fly-titan-follow-up-ingenuity-mars

Dragonfly drone to fly on Titan in follow-up of Ingenuity on Mars
by Matt Hamblen | May 4, 2021 5:24pm

The Dragonfly drone, the size of a small car, is designed to investigate
pre-biotic chemistry on Titan, the largest moon on Saturn. The mission
will last two years, with a launch from Earth set for 2027. (Johns
Hopkins APL)

After Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, Dragonfly will be the next NASA drone
helicopter to fly above the surface of another world when it arrives on
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, after launching from Earth in 2027.

Dragonfly will be much larger than tiny Ingenuity-- about the size of a
small car-- although it is still undergoing design. It will conduct a
mission lasting over two years to investigate samples on the surface of
Titan’s organic oceanic world.

The dual quadcopter will be able to travel tens of miles in a single
flight, powered by a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator
(MMRTG), like one used on the Perseverance rover on Mars, to provide 60
watts of power to charge onboard batteries. Ingenuity has relied on
solar power, but the atmosphere of Titan is too dense to provide enough
sunlight and Titan is much farther from the Sun than Mars.

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Scientists hope to answer fundamental questions such as what makes a
planet or moon habitable? Or what chemical processes led to the
development of life?

NASA shared the insights of experts for Ingenuity and Dragonfly during
an online YouTube event on Tuesday, taking questions from the public.
Because Dragonfly will be size of a car, it will be hard to test it on
Earth. “We will supplement drone flight tests with a lot of simulations
to cover what we think we might experience on Titan,” said Nishant
Mehta, deputy lead for the Dragonfly Mobile System at Johns Hopkins
Applied Physics Lab.

The Dragonfly team has carefully watched the successful four flights of
Ingenuity on Mars, recognizing that both craft are similar because they
must be piloted autonomously. “With Ingenuity we learned they used a
common cell phone processor, which was really inspiring and surprising
to me,” Mehta said. (Ingenuity relies on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.)

Dragonfly—like Ingenuity—must also be able to survive extreme cold,
which can reach nearly negative 300 degrees F. on Titan, compared to
about 100 below on Mars.

“Survivability is one of the bigger challenges,” said Johnny Lam, an
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“There’s a lot involved…a lot of work and testing,” including for a
heater which has kept Ingenuity at an operating temperature to guarantee
it will wake up every day.

Ingenuity has relied on Perseverance to transmit images and data to Mars
orbiters which in turn relay it to Earth. But Titan, so far, has no
orbiters and will rely on a high gain antenna to transmit images and
data to Earth directly. It will have the ability to take one picture per
second, but the challenge will be getting that data back to Earth, with
data rates of 10 kilobits per second. “That’s not a lot, so we’ll be
spending time optimizing what data to bring down,” Mehta said.

While Perseverance on Mars will be collecting Mars rocks and dust, the
samples will not be analyzed until they are picked up on a later mission
in 2026 or 2028 to return to Earth for analysis. Dragonfly, meanwhile,
will be able to test the Titan surface and atmosphere and send back data
by using a mass spectrometer and a neutron-activated gamma-ray
spectrometer. It will also have meteorology sensors for monitoring the
atmosphere. It will even conduct seismic studies to detect subsurface
activity.

Scientists learned starting in 2004 with the Cassini orbiter and its
radar and near-infrared imaging and a Huygens probe that was parachuted
down to the Titan surface that moon has a salty ocean beneath the
water-ice surface.

Cassini also revealed that Titan’s surface has rivers, lakes and seas of
liquid ethane and methane. The methane can form clouds and even rain,
which falls much slower than on Earth. That is because Titan’s
atmosphere is four times denser than Earth’s and its gravity is about
1/7th of Earth’s. Both of those factors favor Dragonfly’s ability to fly
even with its sizeable weight compared to Ingenuity’s four pounds.

Because Titan’s atmosphere is mostly made up of nitrogen with some
methane, their molecules are split apart when exposed to sunlight and
then recombine to form complex organic compounds. Those organic
molecules are the reason scientists are so thrilled to travel to Titan
and make measurements because organic molecules are the building blocks
of life. Scientists last fall discovered a carbon-based molecule, C3H2,
in Titan’s atmosphere using a radio telescope.

“Titan’s unique combination of abundant, complex, carbon-rich
chemistry on its largely water-ice surface makes it an ideal location
for such investigations,” APL says on its web site.

A short video from 2018 by JHU APL describes the purpose behind the mission:

Dragonfly’s mission to search for evidence of pre-biotic chemistry may
sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the work is underway. NASA
News Events Supervisor Jia-Rui Cook pointed out that Tuesday’s online
event was staged for May 4th, widely known as the “May the Fourth be
with you” from the Star Wars saga.

RELATED: Ingenuity rocks 4th flight and wins a starring operations role

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