Greenbelt, Maryland: NASA announced on Thursday that it's sending a drone called Dragonfly to explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Using propellers, the spacecraft will fly from location to location on the icy moon to study whether it can support microbial life.
The mission is part of NASA's competitive New Frontiers program, the same program that sponsored the New Horizons spacecraft that brought us the first images of Pluto.
The Dragonfly beat out nearly a dozen other proposed projects, including its chief competitor project to collect samples from a nearby comet. It's slated to launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.
"The ultimate goal is to get to Selk crater which is a really large crater on Titan it's about 50 miles across. And we want to get there because we think that at Selk crater the three ingredients you need for life were mixed together said Curt Niebur, NASA Lead Program Scientist for New Frontiers.
Titan is a haze-covered world with a thick atmosphere that covers a strangely Earthlike surface. The moon has lakes of methane, mountains of ice and a water ocean below the surface, making it an attractive place to explore whether its environment can support primitive life.
"The great thing about Titan is it's very similar chemically to the to Earth before life evolved," Niebur said.
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He said, "We can't go back in time on Earth and learn the lessons about the chemistry that eventually led to life but we can go to Titan and we can pursue those questions."
Titan was last studied by the international Cassini-Huygens mission. In 2017, the Cassini spacecraft plunged into Saturn, ending two decades of exploration.
