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Goddard Engineering and Technology Directorate

Looking to Our Neighbors for Answers

An artist's imagination of an image of Dragonfly flying across the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan.
An artist’s imagination of Drangonfly flying across the surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan.

A Moon with a Story to Tell

Dragonfly is NASA’s newest mission to explore the solar system, delivering an 8-bladed rotorcraft to visit Saturn’s largest and richly organic moon, Titan. Slated for launch in 2027 and arrival in 2034, Dragonfly will sample and examine dozens of promising sites around Saturn’s icy moon and advance our search for the building blocks of life. The ETD will contribute to this mission by building a portion of the Dragonfly Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (DraGNS), an instrument that can determine the elemental composition of the ground immediately below the lander without taking in any samples. This quick surface analysis at each new site will help the scientists determine the type of sampling performed, if necessary, as well as whether a more detailed chemical analysis should be performed. This mission is in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Within Goddard itself, both 550 and 560 from the ETD will be contributing to the spectrometer and laser instruments used in this mission.