We've looked at a number of concepts for exploring Titan over the years, from aircraft capable of staying aloft for a year or more to balloons and boats that would float on the moon's seas. Dragonfly, the work of a team based at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD, is a rotorcraft with the capability of exploiting Titan's thick atmosphere to stop, sample, and move on, shaping its investigations along the way as it explores an environment rich in targets. These are the advantages of a rover, though here we're in a landscape so exotic that it enables different tools than the ones we use on Mars. And with the success of the Martian rovers in mind, what good news that NASA has chosen Dragonfly as the next mission in its New Frontiers program. We can anticipate launch in 2026 and arrival at Titan in 2034, with a craft that will sample surface organics and examine prebiotic chemistry and potential habitability. Image: This illustration shows NASA's Dragonfly...

Night launches are spectacular, that's for sure, especially with a rocket as muscular as the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Less spectacular, at least at this point in my life, is staying up until 0230, but delays are part of the rocket business, and what counts is a launch successful in everything but the return of the center booster (both side boosters landed upright at Cape Canaveral). Prox-1, the carrier vehicle for The Planetary Society's LightSail 2, was released at 720 kilometers, with deployment of the sail itself scheduled for July 2. While we wait for LightSail developments and also follow the fortunes of NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock, launched as one of 24 satellites deployed by this bird, the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference in Seattle draws attention this morning with new information about Saturn's tantalizing moon Titan. I'm still having to adapt to not having Cassini in Saturn space, but without its presence scientists are proceeding with laboratory studies that re-create...

Both DSAC (the Deep Space Atomic Clock) and LightSail 2 are on the line when a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches on Monday evening. Both missions portend interesting developments in our push to deep space, with DSAC testing our ability to extend navigational autonomy, and LightSail 2 a solar sail that will use the power of solar photons to raise its orbit. You can follow the launch (now scheduled for 2330 Eastern (0330 UTC) on NASA Live. Also lifting off with the Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center will be almost two dozen other satellites, a nod both to the Falcon Heavy's capabilities but also to increasing spacecraft miniaturization. And speaking of interesting missions, here's something good about one whose anniversary we're about to celebrate. My friend Al Jackson, who served as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator in the Apollo days, passed along a link to the Air-to-Ground Loop and the Flight Director's Loop from Apollo 11. Give yourself 20 minutes or so and don't...

Cassini's productivity at Saturn continues to provide fodder for scientific papers and encouragement for the builders of complex missions, who have seen enough data gathered by this one to guarantee continuing insights into the ringed planet for years to come. The June 14 issue of Science offers up four papers (citations below) that show results from four of the spacecraft's instruments, including startling views of the main rings. The data examined in the Science papers were gathered during Cassini's ring-grazing orbits from December, 2016 to April of 2017 as well as during the 'Grand Finale' between April and September of 2017, when Cassini flew closer than ever before to the giant planet's cloud tops. Consider the image below, showing an infrared view as captured by the spacecraft's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), with (at the left) the natural color view taken as a composite by Cassini's Imaging Science Subsystem. Imaging the rings in visible and near-infrared...

We have priceless data on Europa from the Voyager and Galileo missions, but we're updating earlier interpretations thanks to new work with both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea (Hawaii). Thus the discovery that the yellow color visible on parts of Europa's surface in visible light is most likely sodium chloride (NaCl), familiar as table salt and the principal component of sea salt. That's an interesting result, given that it suggests a Europan ocean chemically more similar to Earth's than we had previously assumed. The re-thinking of the spacecraft data stems from the fact that Galileo was equipped with the Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer instrument, useful for analyzing the surface of a planetary body. What Galileo lacked, however, was a visible spectrometer to complement its near-infrared device. The problem: Chlorides are not apparent in the near-infrared. While Galileo had found water ice, it identified a substance believed to be magnesium...