NASA is inviting people around the world to send their names to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, aboard Dragonfly. The campaign, called “Send Your Name to Titan,” lets participants take part symbolically in the mission, which is designed to explore the moon in the coming years.
Names submitted through NASA’s campaign will be recorded on a microchip that will travel with the spacecraft. Participants will also receive a personalized digital boarding pass. Registration is free and remains open until January 15, 2027.
NASA associate administrator Nicky Fox said the agency was excited to bring people along on the mission and encouraged the public to add their names to the aircraft. Dragonfly is scheduled to launch in 2028 and reach Titan in late 2034.
Unlike a lander that stays at its landing site, Dragonfly is an eight-rotor aircraft, similar to a large drone, that will make flights of several kilometers to investigate different geological environments on Titan’s surface.
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter’s Ganymede. It is also larger than Mercury. Its dense atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen and is about four times denser than Earth’s, making the moon’s surface difficult to see from space.
Titan is the only known place besides Earth with stable liquids on its surface and an observed weather cycle involving clouds, rain, rivers and lakes. With surface temperatures around 179 degrees below zero, however, water is frozen and forms part of the crust.
Dragonfly is not intended to search for life. Its goal is to study the chemistry that preceded the emergence of life on Earth, said principal investigator Zibi Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Sources: elDiario.es.