Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseNASA is building an awesome drone to fly around the surface of Saturn's moon. What will it find?
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Hey, Jorge, you're a robotics expert, right.
Well, I have a PhD in robotic so I think that might qualify me awesome.
Well, how do you feel about using robots to explore space?
I think it's great. Better them than me.
Yeah, because on some dangerous missions, we send robots rather than people. But do you ever like worry about the robots.
Well, we try not to program feelings into them, so I guess not so much.
Even though the robots don't always make it.
I think that's okay, you know. I think we are proud still what the robots achieved.
I think it's weird sometimes though, that we never bring those robots home. We send them out to space, we run them into the ground, and then we just sort of abandon them.
Well, what do you think would be cool to bring them home and throw them a parade?
Yeah? Maybe all the other robots would be so proud.
Yeah, but then who would clean up all the ticker tapes we have to send robots to clean up after the parade.
Robots should make their own robots.
And that's how it all ends. Daniel I am more handmade cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm looking forward to working with robotic physicists.
With robot physicists or for robot physicists, which feature do you for se for science?
Whatever gets us to the deep truths of the universe. I'm on board for that.
Really, you would subjugate yourself to the AI overlords in exchange for deep secrets of the universe.
Yeah, I'm not going to put my ego in front of revealing the truth about nature. None of this. I have to be in charge because I'm human, even though you're much smarter than I am. Absolutely not. I'm happy to work for a genius robotic physicist.
Do you think robots would be interested in the deep secrets of the universe? What would be the motivation?
Yeah, that's a good question. We would have to program them to be interested. We have to like train robots to be excited about it and then set them loose and hope that the answers they find are things that we could even understand.
M I feel like we're so bad at racing children now, the idea of raising super intelligent robots doesn't sound like a good idea.
Well, wouldn't you prefer to program children rather than raise them?
That's what television is there for, Daniel, That's why they make kids TV shows. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to understand the entire universe before our AI overlords do it for us. We think about all the crazy questions out there. Where is life, where could it start? What are tiny little particles doing anyway? What's going on inside the heart of a black hole? We take these mysteries, we join them with here curiosity, and we try to find explanations that makes sense to you.
Because the universe is huge and there's a lot to explore. There are a lot of mysteries out there and the vast reaches of space and other galaxies and other galaxy clusters and black holes, and there's also a lot of mystery right here in our own backyard universally speaking.
Yeah, that's right. It's incredible how much of the universe we can see just from our tiny little perch on this rock. Using our incredible telescopes, we can see things that are super far away and answer really big and vast questions about the nature of the universe. But sometimes you want to get off your rock and you want to actually go to another place and get like up close pictures, or see through cloud cover, or dip your robotic toe into some alien ocean and see what's actually there.
Yeah, because it's sort of funny now that I think about it, the difference between how far we can see and how much of the universe we know about, and how much of it we've actually been to, which is almost nothing. Like we hardly ever left this little ball of rock that we call or.
Yeah, we've explored almost literally nothing of the universe. It's sort of like we're trapped on this tower and we can look out these windows. We can see this incredible view right so far away, but it's so difficult to get anywhere. We've explored basically almost nothing. But you know, there are a few opportunities nearby. We can hop to one or two nearby towers. But yeah, we're basically in a little tower prison.
Yeah, and also it's hard to get off your couch, you know sometimes. I mean it's a lot of work to get out of that tower. You have to like put together a rocket, you have to strap in.
Is this your application to be an astronaut? Because it's not going very well.
My application not to be drafted into Space Force. This is might deferm an application.
I don't think you have to apply to not be an astronaut. I think that happens automatically.
But good luck, well, It is fun because there are a lot of things in our backyard in our own solar system that we don't know about, and a lot of fun places we could go and explore and maybe even visit one day.
Yeah, and there are surprises around the corner. There are lots of weird things happening in our solar system, things that we don't understand, things we would like to see up close. And every time we open up a new kind of eyeball to the universe or land on a new surface, there's always something new and weird waiting for us, something that scientists didn't even know to look for, something that people are shocked to discover, something that teaches us something about life or how the universe works. So this is a very exciting time to be exploring our neighborhood solar system.
Ly speaking, Yeah, we don't even know that there is life at all in the Solar system. There could be life in other planets or moons in our very own solar system.
Yeah, I think the history is sort of fun. Like for a long time people imagined there might be life nearby on Mars. It was sort of like, wow, there could be life everywhere, And then we sort of didn't see obvious signs, and I feel like the public impression is that, well, there isn't any life in the Solar System other than us, we have to look further. But now people are starting to realize that's not true. There are still lots of opportunities to discover life in our Solar system, from subsurface water on Mars to some of these oceans of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on right here in our Solar system.
Yeah, so today we'll be talking about a pretty cool project that's happening right now, which is to send robots to a moon of Saturn.
That's right. It's very difficult to send people to actually walk on these surfaces to go take these long trips. So instead we send our future robotic overlords on these missions to go and explore these surfaces for us.
Do you think there'll be a good excuse when they try to take over? We'd be like, but look, we send you to Mars. I mean, you can't complain that we never take you anywhere.
I don't know. I don't know if that'll be in the plus or in the minus column, Like you know, do you think they'll think that we treated those robotic explorer as well, you know, just having abandoned them on the surface of Mars.
Yeah, well what do dogs think about Laika? But anyway, so today on the program, we'll be asking the question what will the Dragonfly Mission find on Titan?
And the Dragonfly Mission is this super amazing, incredible robotic mission to explore Saturn's moon, Titan, which I am very excited about.
Yeah, so it's a lot of fun words there, dragon Fly Mission, Titan. I feel like, you know, it'd just be cool to say you work on this, brother?
It does? It sounds sort of like a future Michael Bay movie.
Doesn't It doesn't the Dragonfly Mission. Do you think Bruce Willims would come out of retirement? And is he retired?
He's not allowed to retire. I think there's an executive order preventing him from retiring.
But this is a pretty exciting mission, and as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of it or know what they're trying to find on that moon of Saturn. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet to ask what will the Dragonfly Mission find on Titan?
And as usual. I am deeply grateful to those of you who are willing to answer random questions from a physicist without any preparation or looking up in reference materials, So thank you very much. And if you would like to participate and answer questions for future episodes without any briefing or preparation, please write to us to questions at Danielanjorge dot com.
So here's what people had to say.
I've heard that Titan might have liquid oceans of methane. I might discover or research alternative forms of.
Life if a dragonfly wasn't Titan. The first thing I'm sure that the dragonfly would realize or I would see would be the space shuttle that brought the dragonfly there, and guessing second thing probably would be the big Jupiter in the background in the sky. But other than that, I don't really know.
I actually didn't know there was a mission to Titan, but if I remember correctly, Titan is a moon of Saturn, and Saturn has a crazy environment with diamonds floating around, so there would probably be a lot of interesting compounds up there. I know there's a lot of ice locked in the rings, so it would be interesting if the moon was harboring in some complex organic molecules aliens. It looks like it is a focus of all NAS's mission for today to investigate the early Solar system and information.
Oh, I'm starting thinking like usual vern type of stories. Now my son finds something organic, who knows, But I don't think it can be cold, quite live, But I'm seriously curious to find out.
Maybe Dragonfly discovers that Titan is a much friendlier place than Mars, and then even mouscast to change his plans.
All right, pretty cool, I like aliens. Aliens was a good answer. Well, I'm with one of the listeners here who said they didn't even know there was a mission to Titan. I did not know there was a mission to Titan. You know, usually people talk about Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter, or they talk about landing more things in our mood here on Earth, But time you don't really hear a lot about.
Yeah, And one reason might be is that this mission is still sort of deep in the future. But you know, they take a long time to plan, to build, to organize, to actually arrive at these distant locations, and so it's like a twenty year life cycle. Of these missions, and so that's why it might not be in people's minds right now.
Well, it's a twenty year mission for real.
Oh absolutely, It takes years just to get there, years to plan it, years to fund it. We're going to be getting data from this thing in like twenty thirty.
Six, Oh my goodness. And we assume there's going to be a civilization here to receive those signals.
Well, we're going to teach our robots to get those messages right so that they benefit from our work.
Could it be in our collective will Oh by the way, some of your ancestors might be calling at around twenty thirty six.
Pick up the call, that's right, and please can we be last authors on the paper you eventually write.
But who would read the paper? Other computers?
God? Yeah, it'd be like that weird corner of YouTube where bots make videos for other bots.
Oh my goodness, bots making science papers for other bots.
That is the future for sure.
Well, maybe a lot of people don't know what Titan actually is, or this might be the first time they hear that there's a moon on Saturn called Titan Daniel. What do we know about the moon of Saturn called titan It's awesome.
It's Titanic. I mean this thing is.
That's not good. That's not a good analogy.
Then, I mean, it's not going to crash into an iceberg. I just mean that it's huge and awesome.
Yeah, and it has Leonardo Dicapri in it. What could go wrong?
That's right. We're gonna send Celine Dion actually to stand on it and sing as our first emissary to titan. No, it's fifty percent bigger than our moon. It's bigger than Mercury. It's huge.
Well, it's bigger than one of the planets in our Solar system.
Yeah, exactly. If it wasn't orbiting Saturn, then you would definitely call this thing a planet. And if you were standing on the surface of Saturn, if Saturn had a surface, this thing is so big that it would be like twelve times larger in the sky of Saturn, then our moon is in our sky, it would be huge. It would be huge, yes, exactly, So it'd be pretty dramatic.
Yeah, because Saturn has several moons, So you're saying, is this one of those moons or is this the biggest one?
This is one of those moons. And it's the biggest one and so dominate the sky of Saturn. You couldn't actually see it though from Saturn because Saturn is just so cloudy you can't see out through its atmosphere. But that's how big, and that's how close it is to Saturn. So it's sort of a fund mental image.
Does Saturn have like huge tides, then I'm just thinking about the moon here. It affects the tides.
Yeah. Absolutely, Saturn squeezes Titan, and Titan squeezes Saturn. And one of the reasons that Titan is so interesting is that it's not just a frozen ball, and part of that is because it gets this tidal squeezing from Saturn. Like also, some of the moons of Jupiter have this effect where they're getting pulled on by their home planet and that squeezes them and keeps them from freezing solid. And so just like some of those other moons, we think that underneath the ground on Titan there are the these vast oceans of liquid ammonia, but there also might be liquid lakes on the surface of Titan.
Wow, wait, do we have pictures of Titan? Have we ever flown a satellite or probe nearby and taking pictures like kind of Google that.
You can Actually you can get pictures from the surface of Titan because in two thousand and five we had a lander that landed on Titan. So this is the record for the most distant surface that we've ever landed in Earth probe on and it landed just in one spot. And one interesting thing about Titan is that it has a really dense atmosphere. Most of these moons have no atmosphere, and Titan itself actually has a really dense atmosphere, but that makes it hard to see the surface from space. So we had an orbiter going around Titan for a while taking pictures, but you couldn't really see the surface because of the dense cloud cover.
It just sort of looks like Jupiter does. Did you see clouds, yeah?
Or Venus exactly. So we dropped a probe onto the surface and you can get this picture from the surface of Titan. I mean, all you see basically is a plane with a bunch of rocks in it, But you can tell from how that surface looks that, like you know, water used to flow on the surface. It's sort of awesome and fascinating to see a picture from a foreign surface.
Oh wow, So we actually landed the probe. We didn't just crash it like. It landed and took pictures.
It landed and took like a picture and sent it back. But it was sort of stuck in one location, right, It just landed and stuck. There wasn't a rover, couldn't move around, and so it was pretty exciting but kind of limited. So we have visited Titan before and we have landed something on it, but the Dragonfly mission we're going to talk about today is going to explore it in much more depth. And we think the Titan is pretty interesting. Titan, we think actually looks a lot like Earth. I mean, there's like dunes and rivers and lakes. The sort of the geology of the surface we think is very similar to what Earth looks like.
Oh wow. So from space you can't see the surface because of the clouds, but once you're in it, you can sort of look around and see the landscape.
Yeah, and from the surface you can do things like radar and stuff like that. You can see that they're there are lakes on the surface. This is the only other place in the Solar System we know about that has surface liquid. Now it's not surface water. Most of this is like methane. So Titan is sort of like Earth, but you take away all the water and you replace it with liquid methane.
Wow, that sounds like it would smell terribly exactly.
But you have like methane lakes and methane rivers and methane rain, and you have wind. And you can see a lot of this stuff from the orbiter because you can see through the clouds using you know, some radar, et cetera. So we know that there are lakes on the surface, we know this stuff happening, this erosion. There's all this geology. It's fascinating.
So it looks rocky like like here, like if you were it looks like a rocky landscape with pools of ammonia.
Yeah, exactly, and rivers, you know, and rain and all sorts of rivers of ammonia. Yeah, and lakes and all sorts of stuff. I don't know if there are alien fish jumping up from idyllic lakes, you know, nestle in mountains or anything, but that's sort of what the mission is aiming to look for.
Wow, well, our fish, you're just holding your nose the whole time.
Now they're used to it, they love it. They think water smells terrible.
All right, So then what is the atmosphere made out of? Is it like breathable air or is it poisonous gas?
Well, like Earth's atmosphere, it's mostly nitrogen. It doesn't have oxygen in it, so we couldn't breathe it. But it's a very very dense atmosphere that actually plays a really big role we'll talk about in a minute into how this Dragonfly mission works.
All right, let's talk about the mission that's going to explore this moon on Saturn, and then actually, Daniel, you have an interview with the two leads of the project. Then they're going to fill us in on what it's like to lead this mission and to think about what to find on Titan. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we are sending dragons flying dragons to Titan.
Well sort of, We're sending a drone. This thing is super awesome basically because all the advancements in drone technology here on Earth. You know, everybody has like a drone to do everything. We're now turning our robotic probes into other services into drones as well.
So this is an actual NASA mission. It's on now and it's going to be on for the next twenty something years, and it is to send literally a drone, like a flying little machine to explore the surface of Titan.
Yeah, exactly. It's an octocopter. It has eight of these rotors. Each one is like a meter wide, and it can fly around the surface. And the cool thing is that that allows it to like really explore the surface sort of the way a rover does, but without having to like drive slowly from place to place. This thing can go like ten meters per second. That's like the speed of Usain Bolt, you know, so we can really explore the surface of Titan.
Wow. Yeah, because I guess we send robots to Mars and but then they're really slow, right they are, and they can like they get stuck inside of holes or they can't go over mountains or rocky terrain. So this is like a perfect solution.
Yeah, and you know, I always wonder what that's like. I think that for the rovers on Mars, they have to have like meetings. They're like, how we're going to get around this rock, or we're going to go this way. They want to turn left and they're going to stop, We're going to turn right, and it's you know, pretty care and they have to be pretty crazy because you know, they this thing over and it's like a turtle on its back. So the drone is pretty awesome because, yeah, you can skip over stuff, you can really explore. But you can do a drone on Titan much more easily than you can do a drone on Mars for one really important reason, and that's because Titan has a very dense atmosphere.
Right. The denser the air, the easier it is to fly.
Yeah, exactly. The reason that helicopters can't go to the top of Mount Everest, for example, is that the air gets too thin. They're like beating their rotor blades against nothing. And on Mars it's very difficult to build a helicopter, though they're going to try that. But on Titan it's a perfect application for a drone because there's really really thick atmosphere, so it's sort of more like swimming than flying. Plus the gravity is pretty low, so flying around Titan is really the best way to get around.
So, I guess it's smaller than Earth. So what's the gravity like on Titan.
Yeah, so Titan is like two percent of the mass of the Earth. So the gravity on Titan is definitely much much less, but the atmosphere is thicker than it is here on Earth. So it's really a great application for a drone.
Wow, So does that mean it's like, you know, one fiftieth the gravity as we have here.
It's definitely a lot smaller. It depends also on the radius, right, So Titan is smaller than the Earth, and so that's going to enhance the gravitational factor. But so you know, approximately like a tenth of the gravity of Earth, but again a thicker atmosphere, and so that allows this thing to really like float around the surface and figure out like what's going on on Titan? What's here, what's there? What's exciting to look for it?
Right? Catch some ammonia, fish, sit by a lake, take some selfies.
It's a fascinating project because they think, they hope that the surface of Titan is a great place to answer questions like what did Earth used to look like? They see it as sort of like an early Earth.
Really, like our planet used to also be like this, like a full of ammonia and magigen.
Well, it has a different atmosphere, right, We don't think that it had the same chemical composition, but it's sort of this progress of starting from hydrocarbons, how do you form the basis of life? How does that come together to make the chemistry you need and then eventually the biochemistry And so Titan is sort of like, you know, behind the Earth in that process, and it gives us a window to understanding like what forms first, how do these things come together?
I guess maybe one question is, you know, this sounds great, but drones run out of battery at some point and it's cloudy in Titan. How does this get any energy if it's flying around?
Yeah, you can't use solar power, not just because it's cloudy on Titan, but because remember Saturn is really far away from the Sun, so the solar power is really really dim. So this thing has a pretty cool system. The drone itself has a lithium ion battery, just like the kind of things you know you find in your laptop. Then there's like a power station that can recharge it, and it's recharged by a radioactive thermoelectric generator. That's something that's basically a big pile of plutonium which is decaying radioactively and heating up a little system which turns that heat into electricity.
Wow, it has like a nuclear power plant on.
It, Yes, exactly, So got a nuclear power plant which is going to last for a long long time and then it can fly around for like ten kilometers and come back and then it's got to recharge.
Right, And this is not new. I think most of the Mars rovers have a nuclear power plant, right.
Yeah, this is not new. We even doing this for decades, powering distance systems with nuclear power plants, so that technology is pretty well established.
Cool. And then so how are we going to fly this thing around? Is it autonomous or is there like a joystick control.
No, it's way too far away for us to control it in real time. Right, the time for light to get to Titan and back is tens and tens of minutes. So there's no way that you want to be flying this thing around. So it's going to be pretty autonomous. It's going to take a lot of AI and careful calculations to drive itself around. But you know, flying is simpler than driving because as long as you're above the obstacles, you know, you're mostly free to move around. But this thing also has to sort of land autonomously, and it's got this crazy plan for how to get down to the surface.
Oh, let's talk about that. How is it gonna land on? Like are we deployed the little helicopter from space or are we landing like a launching pad and like a whole like mini spaceship and then the helicopter emerges from that.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. We're sending this thing a tight it's gonna rive in twenty thirty six, and it's got this like dual parachute system to come down closer to the surface. And then when it's about a mile from the surface, just over a kilometer. Actually, then the lander is going to be released for powered flight to the surface, So it's gonna fly itself down to the surface autonomously. It's gonna like figure out exactly where to land and how to get there and avoid boulders and all sorts of stuff. It's going to actually like fly itself to the surface, which is pretty cool. And you know, it's seventy light minutes from Earth, which means it's gonna happen. And then we're just gonna wait an hour and ten minutes to hear about whether it crashed or whether it was successful or what.
Wow, that's crazy, but I guess we're landing something like a little spaceship and then the hell helicopter comes from that, or is the whole land or the helicopter.
The whole lander is the helicopter. It's all in one. It could fly around and then when the battery is exhausted, it can sit on the surface and slowly recharge the battery from the power plant. It uses power faster than the power plant generates it, so it operates in bursts while the battery recharges. And it's also planned that it's only going to explore it during Titan's daytime.
Oh interesting, how often does the day happen in Titan?
Well, night on Titan lasts for one hundred and ninety two hours. It's like eight earth days.
That sounds like a pretty good nap there exactly.
So it's got a lot of time to sit there and recharge and for humans on Earth like make a plan for the next exploration. So it's going to be a lot of fun.
And then the daytime lasts another one hundred and ninety two hours. Mm hm, oh wow. Yeah, I don't think I can work that long.
Even if you slept one hundred and ninety two hours, that wouldn't power you. Maybe we should get a nuclear power plant inside you. Maybe that would help you.
Yeah, that's what we all need, some plutonium in our time, all right. So that's pretty cool. So it's launching in twenty twenty seven. It's going to take really nine years to get there.
It's far away, right, This solar system is huge, and this is basically the edge of the outer Solar system, and you know, to get there on a low budget, they're going to pass it by Earth a few times for a gravitational assist, so you don't need to have like as powerful a rocket. So yeah, it's going to take a while to get there. It's not going to rise for nine years.
Whoa, So what do the scientists do for nine years to just like take a break, like all right, we'll go grab some coffee, come back in nine years.
They think about all the mistakes they made in the design, and they worry, worry, worry. Wow sounds tough, No, And they make science plans for what they're going to do when it lands. You know, they still have power to control with the choices it makes for how it's going to explore Titan, and so they just get to think about that. But that's a question I asked the scientists, So you'll enjoy hearing their answer.
Yeah, because the drone will have a lot of cool instruments, like what kinds of things does it have? And what is it going to to be looking for?
Yeah, well, it's got cameras first of all, like tiny little cameras for looking at stuff close up, and then panoramic cameras because one of our questions is just like what does the surface look like? You know, most of it is shrouded by clouds, and we've seen this one picture from this one spot that aren't probe landed or we're just curious, like what does the surface look like. And then there's things like a mass spectrometer that's something that can take chemicals and tell you how heavy each molecule is, so you get an idea for like what's there, which elements are there, which like you know, organic molecules have come together. And then they want to measure the surface composition, so they have like a little gamma ray and a neutron spectrometer that can id the surface composition, you know, bouncing things off of it and seeing how they react. And then they have a sizemometer something that's going to measure like the internal structure of Titan listening basically for Titan quakes.
Wow, for like iceberg crashes just in case.
Yeah, because they think that there's internal interesting structure on Titan. They think that there's a lot of ice in there. But there might also be like huge oceans of liquid methane that burp up to the surface, that like crack up to the surface and make these cryo volcanoes, these volcanoes that shoot out water and methane vapor whoa, but.
It sounds like mostly it's just sort of too. I mean, there's a lot of great science, but it's just really I mean, the big idea is just to go there and see what it's like, right, just to like look around and see how it's different and the same from Earth.
Yeah, exactly. It's a mission of exploration. You know, it's like the first time that humans ever walked on a new island or something. We just didn't know what we would find, and that's the excitement of exploration, is the potential for crazy surprises. So if what scientists thinks is happening on Titan is happening, they'll get a lot of fascinating measurements. We'll learn a lot about how life started in chemistry and all that cool stuff. But the really exciting thing about this, on top of you know, flying a drone on alien moon, is the possibility to see something weird, something new, something unexpected, something just like shocking. And I love imagining that moments, you know, twenty years into the mission, when they're going to get the first picture back from the surface, it's going to appear, you know, line by line on the screens in Nassa, and they're gonna be there at the edge of their seat, It's like, wow, what is this picture gonna show us?
Yeah, because they might even find life, right, Like, is that one of the things they're going to be looking for. Do they have instruments to look for life on Titan?
Yeah, they might find life. You know, they might find very very simple life, you know, microbial life in these lakes, et cetera. And it's difficult to identify life at all, you know, even here on Earth. If you take like a sample of water and you give it to microbiologist and ask like, are there living things in here? Basically they just like use microscopes and look up close and see if they see things wiggling. It's difficult to do on an alien surface with limited technology. What they plan to do is like use the mass spectrometer to figure out like what molecules are being created and then argue about whether or not those things can be created without life, sort of like how we thought we saw phosphene on Venus, Remember, and we think that phosphene is only made by life. If you see things on the surface that we think are only made by life, then you can argue life must be there. Otherwise you have to like actually find like a little microbe. But you know, they have microscopic cameras, so maybe they'll actually see something wiggling.
Whol Well, that would be pretty cool picture.
That would be a historic photograph for sure.
Yeah. All right, so, Daniel, you talked to the two leads on the project, doctor Elizabeth Turtle and doctor Melissa Trainer, and they're like the heads of the project.
Yeah, exactly. Elizabeth Turtle is the PI and she sort of runs the whole mission, the planning, the projects, sending the thing over. And Melissa Trainer is sort of the head scientist in terms of the instruments and what questions they're going to be asking. And so I had a lot of fun talking to them about this mission and what it's like to work on a twenty year long project.
All right, well let's get into your interview with the two leads to the Dragonfly mission. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the Dragonfly mission to Tighten, which is to send a flying octocopter with the Nuclear Power Energy Station NAVID fly around one of the moves of Saturn, which is enough a'bsolute sounds like a pretty cool project. And Daniel, you talked to the two leads on the project, doctor Elizabeth Turtle and doctor Melissa Trainer about what it's like to work on this long term and exciting mission.
I did. I was really glad that they took some time out of their busy schedules preparing for this crazy event in twenty years to talk to me about science.
All right, So here is Daniel's interview with the leads of the Dragonfly mission project.
All right, so I'm very pleased to have two wonderful science guests on our program today. Could you too introduce yourself?
Sure, I'm Zimby Turtle.
I'm at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and I'm the principal investigator of the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission to Titan.
I'm a lost a trainer, I were getting AASA Gottard Stage Flight Center, and I'm working with Vivi on the Dragonfly mission.
Wonderful. Well, thanks very much for coming on our program and answering a bunch of our science questions. I want to dig into the science of your mission and how it's all going to work. But first I have a request from my daughter. She's eleven years old, and when I told her I was going to be interviewing you too, she said she had a question for you, which was how do you get to work on such a fun NASA project? So maybe you could each tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are.
Sure, I've always been interested in the planets, you know, in the stars, and you know, astronomy and planetary science, and so I studied a lot of science and math in high school and college.
I majored in physics and college at MIT, and.
I then went on to graduate school in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. And I've worked in a few different missions over the course of my career so far, including the Galleo mission that went to Jupiter and the Cassini mission that went to Saturn, and of course studied Titan, among lots of other things in the Saturnian system and the Europea Clipper mission as well as Dragonfly and a few others as well along the way.
Very cool, So you knew from the beginning the kind of things you wanted to study.
Yeah, I've just always been interested in planetary science and astronomy.
I can't remember learning the planets. I've always like the part of my geography before I remember learning them.
Cool and knew, Melissa, sure so.
A lot like what Zippy said. I was always very interested in science and math when I was in elementary school and high school, but I decided to go ahead and major in chemistry because I really loved doing hands on lab work. So my original thought wasn't necessarily that I would be sitting planets, although I found them fascinating. But when I went to graduate school, I was thinking I was going to study Earth's atmosphere to do atmosphere chemistry on Earth turns out Earth to the planet, so a lot of the same rules and interest supply, and I actually ended up doing a really interesting project that was studying the types of organic synthesis that happened in Titan's autophere and drawing connections not to Earth today, but to Earth billions of years ago. What the planet might have been like a long time ago in the atmosphere had a different composition and you might see chemistry like what we saund Titan. So I wasn't involved in any missions when I was in graduate school, but the type of work I did. I also studied some processes that we thought might be occurring in Mars is an atmosphere, and the types of tools I used in the lab work I did. Ultimately is how I got my job at Daughter's Safe Play Center and working in a group that builds instruments that go to other planets. So that's when I got involved first in the MSL mission or curiosity as part of that science team. But my research interest in my real scientific you know baby had always been tightened and studying Titans chemistry, and so that led me to working with When I first was working with Zydbi actually and others who are now on Dragonfly on a prior mission concept, that's when I sort of first got involved in thinking of new ideas for what we can do if we get to go back to Titan, and then ultimately we had the amazing opportunity to start conceiving of Dragonfly.
Very cool. Well, that tanks me directly to my next question, which is what do you think are the most sort of important science questions that might be answered by the instruments that you're building on Dragonfly? What could we learn? What can this do that the two thousand and five lander could not do?
There are a lot of unanswered questions that remain after the Cassini and Huygen's missions in terms of different aspects of Titan. Titan is a very complex system like the Earth, right, It's a very you know, it's a very complex, interconnected system, and you know, we have the Huygan's probe that descended down through the atmosphere, made a lot of measurements of the atmosphere, landed on the surface and provided some information in one view of the surface that was completely tantalizing. And of course the Cassini orbiter that really revealed the global geology of Titan and followed tightened through almost half a Titan year, this Atturnian years twenty nine and a half years, and Cassini was active in this Atturnian system for about thirteen years, so we got to watch the weather change on Titan over almost half a year and follow those seasonal changes. So there was a lot of information we gained, but they're really fundamental questions about Titan that remain, including what the materials on the surface are. The solid materials on the surface, we still don't really know their compositions even you know, even at the high level, we know that they're organic materials and their materials with water ice, but not a lot of the details.
And so that's.
Really what we want to understand with Dragonfly, especially because the materials on Titan, the chemistry that's occurring on Titan, maybe very much like the chemistry that occurred on the early Earth that eventually here on Earth led to biology. And because we can't always, you know, study in the laboratory, and certainly can't study on Earth what those chemical processes work, because it's all kind of overprinted by biology here now, Titan, where these processes may be happening today, is a great laboratory for looking at what materials are available. And you know how far organic synthesis can progress in this kind of environment.
Melissa, how about you? Which pieces of information are you most excited to learn when that thing lands on Titan? Which data are you going to look at first when it arives?
Specifically, my real true area of interest, I will say, is in the surface composition and in looking at the types of organ and molecules that are there, and particularly ones not just that we're produced in the atmosphere and potentially deposited on the surface, the ones that may have then undergone sort of advanced chemical processing towards things that would look familiar to us, like building blocks of life, things like amino acids or nuclear bases. You know, a lot of this is grounded in a combination of all the great discoveries that Cassini Huggins made as well as just decades of lab work that has been done and trying to think through what are some of the key processes that might be happening on Titan. And we know that in the laboratory, if we take analogs of Titans organics and we let them sit in water for a while, even for cold temperatures for a year or two, you can get some you know, molecules that are really important for life as we know it. And so the question is, you know, we know that process could happen, but did it?
Does it?
And there are times in Titans tasks where there would have been look at water on the surface even as long as a thousand years or maybe even ten thousand years because of impacts or other events, And so what will we find if we're going and we're you know, drilling a sample out of one of those one of those locations.
I love the mystery of these missions, like we did this so much. We just don't know, such a blank canvas in our minds and in our ideas and in our understanding, and then we go and we actually get data. So then my question for you is what is your sort of most optimistic hope. What's your like fantasy scenario, best case scenario for what this thing sends back to us. Are you looking for like pre body building blocks, you know, amino acids that could stitch together into life, or are you secretly hoping you're going to find microbes on the surface. What's your fantasy scenario.
For me finding like a ray of amino acids, a couple of different ones, maybe some other compounds that we know could have come out of this synthesis of this hydrolysis that we're hoping took place, and hopefully we'll see just a wide array of them. That's my main optimistic hope. And and then I'll bump it up a little bit and if we could see a sign of what we think of as an important biosignature for Earth, like with the amino acids we have, we carry the capability to look for an enhancement in one chirality or the other of molecules. So that's like the left standard versus right handedness. You know on Earth for molecules that are in our bodies that comprise proteins and DNA, that handedness is really important and it's a signature of life. Whereas when you find molecules the amino acids out and comets that are from a biotic synthesis, they typically have even amounts of both directionality versus you know, all of one or all of the other. So if we found not only the kinds of molecules we're looking for, but a big Carol enhancement, that would be amazing. I won't go so far as to suggest that we might find micro but that for me, that would be a fantastic, tremendous success and an amazing discovery.
As Mosa says, it's fundamentally a chemistry mission to understand the chemistry that's possible in these environments that we know have all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it, certainly, and I think it would be really fascinating if we see differences in the chemical components that are available in different environments. And one of the really exciting things about dragonfly is that we can fly from place to place and explore very different places with very different geologic histories, and so we see different chemical components available in those different places that have different histories, including deposits associated with an impact crater where liquid water and organic material may have been in contact for extended periods of time. I think that would be fascinating. One of the other things that I'm really excited about is that we get to put the chemistry. We have these you know, the capability to measure the detailed composition, but we get to put that in the context of the Titan environment, and so we get to make measurements of the atmospheric parameters you know, temperature, pressure, that the humidity, wind, et cetera. We get to take images and see the surface and the landforms and the geologic processes that dictate how the materials on the surface of Titan are transported and mixed together. And we even can make some geophysical measurements, including listening for Titan quakes to understand you know, Titan's geologic activity. So I'm really excited that we get to put the chemistry in into the context of Titan as a system.
Very cool. Of course, all of the answers to these questions are years or more than a decade away, And while it's very exciting, how do you maintain your sort of emotional energy and excitement for a project when the arc of it is you know, ten fifteen years, you're not going in day to day and getting answers to these questions or even making progress on it. What keeps you motivated on a day to day basis?
And the development cycle is also a long time. You know, our launch is scheduled in twenty twenty seven, which seems like a long way away, but it's actually you know, we're really busy, and every day there are new things going.
On and new tests and new design.
Updates and things like that, and so twenty twenty seven is actually going to come really quickly because we've got so much to do between now and then.
And you will, Lisa, what keeps you excited every day?
Well, the it's kind of touching on it. It's true that the actual data that we get at Titan, that's far away, but in the development process, there's already so many little problems to solve or really fascinating questions, you know, to work just to make sure that we're developing the spacecraft and the instruments to do exactly what we want them to do. So you're constantly engaged in the exact type of problem solving and technical development that keeps us all going. So I think that's that's a big motivator for sure.
Something that always impresses me and amazes me by these space missions is that once it's out there, you don't get to go and troubleshoot it and fix it. In my field, if something breaks in the particle accelerator, we can shut the thing down, we can go down there, we can replace it, we can you know, put voltmeters on it, whatever. But here it's gone. And it's such an intricate and elaborate and amazing project. So what part of it worries you the most? You know, which stage of like flying out there and the entry and turning on the actual rotors, which part of it sort of from an engineering point of view, do you think is the riskiest or is going to make you white knuckle it the most.
Each stage of the mission has different risks associated with it in different challenges.
You know.
Right now, the thing that I see that we need to pay the most attention to is making sure all the different development pieces progress together so that we get the information we need from each subsystem to be able to design the other subsystems. Right, everything kind of has to happen at once, and so the timing involve is also really really crucial.
And then you're right.
Once we launch, everything is up to Dragonfly, and I expect each subsystem would think that they have the most challenges, you know, in terms of the you know that they're the most critical, just because there's so many different pieces of it, and you just try to build in as much robustness and redundancy as possible. That's one of the reasons we have the X eight octicopter design with four pairs of rotors, so that you know, even if something you know were to go wrong and one of the roads weren't work, we're still able to fly with the other seven. And so you just build as much, you know, as many contingencies into your design as possible and hope that you don't end up with how the logical situations that you know that go in a different direction than the expectations and umilicity.
You have anything to add about which part of the mission is most nerve wracking for you?
I said, most of my time thinking through the sampling system, getting the surface samples and how we're going to measure the competition. So as viv you said, that's of course what I will say has a lot of challenges.
You know.
What's challenging but also fun about that is if we don't know exactly what we're going to find, that's where we're going to learn what the surface is comprised of. And so our approach is to try to build as if you had the most robust and sort of flexible and adaptable system that we can using the information that we have, but then also being prepared when we get there. You know, we have an impressive payload, a really great complement of measurements that we can take before we even attend to start drilling. You know, we can observe the surfaces visually, we get elemental measurements of the surface. We'll be studying sort of the meteorology, some of the surface properties. So we're going to sort of use our whole arsenal as it is as we think through sampling or how we're going to measure a sample, and then on the instrument side with the mespotrometer, which is what's going to be measuring the molecular composition. You know, we try to think through how to be as flexible as possible, and to your point about worrying about, well, what if something goes wrong. You can't go replace it, certainly, you instead have to learn how to work around it. And so we spend a lot of time on our team thinking through multiple failure scenarios or what could go wrong, and then what would we do to adapt? And in some cases you identify an area, well, it would really help us a lot if we've just put an extra valve here.
You know, just in case.
So we do a lot of that. Anoulysis constantly a trade between making sure that we stay in the box, so to speak, with what our size, our mass power, all those things, but also being ready for the kind.
And how do you figure out how to organize the technology for the mission, given that the mission takes so long to design and to build. By the time you're actually ready to construct the thing, you know, technology has moved forward. Rotor blades are better, instruments are smaller. On a fifteen year timescale, you know, technology, by the time this thing arrives on Titan, it'll be ridiculously out of date. Do you sort of freeze the engineering at some point when you're planning it and then you just move forward, or do you try to catch up as the field moves on As you're building it now.
Absolutely, it's the former will freeze the design as we move forward, and you're right, by the time when we get to Titan, we'll think, wow, that's that's old technology, right, the same way Galileo right in two thousand was using a tape recorder, and by two thousand most people weren't necessarily using tape recorders anymore.
So you definitely see that.
But one of the things that is a great advantage for Dragonfly is that we can use existing technology to apply to the exploration of Titan, and so that makes the design more robust because we have knowledge of that hardware and those components because they have been used before. You know, in many cases like the mass spectrometer. Right, the mass spectrometer is based on the mass spectrometer is currently sitting on Mars right and has been operating there, and so we can take advantage of that to make sure that we understand how the hardware is going to work, how we need to build Dragonfly to support the instrumentation so that everything will work together in the Titan environment when we get there. But you're right, we'll look back and think, wow, that's that's old school.
Yeah. One thing I sort of learned when I got into this business was there's a big difference between state of the art and state of the flight. Something that is like the amazing, awesome instrument that you would use in your laboratory. Do we think of a state of the art once you think about launching that off the planet and sending it out, you know, out into the outer coolar system or wherever you're going and landing and maybe kind of a you know, an intense environment and existing on as in this case, and a body that has a service number year of ninety four Keelevin Right, your fancy instrument in the lab is not going to it's not going to survive that. So we think about the cutting edge and space flight instrumentation is different than the cutting edge and what we might be doing in our research.
Wonderful. Well, then let me ask you one last question, which is a question we usually ask science fiction authors when they're on the program. But you guys are really reaching out into the edges of space and our understanding. So I'm curious what your thoughts are about this. What are your personal answers to the Fermi paradox. You know, given the vastness of space, and the number of habitable planets out there and the age of the universe. Why do you think we haven't been contacted yet? Are we alone in the universe or is there life out there that just hasn't reached out to us for some reason? Pure speculation, no scientific basis.
I think I think part of it is answered by par part of your question, right.
You know, even if there is life out there, there may well be.
Space is vast and it takes a long time even for light to travel across space, and so that makes communication hard. I mean, from for dragonfly to kind of bring it back to dragonfly for a little bit, The time it takes to communicate with dragonfly is seventy to ninety minutes, depending on where Earth and Saturn are in their orbit, right, And so we have to be able to work with dragonfly, and dragonfly has to be able to do everything it needs to do on its own because we can't communicate with it instantly, and that's just communicating with Saturn, right, And so I think the time scales involved with the spatial scale of the universe certainly complicates that. And I don't think we can read into the fact that we haven't been contacted. The assumption that it's because there's no one.
Trying, Well, that's optimistic. I think how you, Melissa.
I agree with everything that we've said, and also I take a very humble approach to it and still wonder if we really know how to be listening, do we know what we're listening for? And this in general is a question that's important in the search for life, whether we're looking for intelligent life or whether we're just looking for microbial life that could be a little different than us. We always have to keep asking ourselves the question, do we know how to listen? Do we know what we're looking for? Do we know what we're listening for? If there was other life out there? And it's a field that you know, I think we're getting better and better at all the time, but it always requires that sort of humble approach.
Very well said. All right, well, thank you both very much for your time, and best of luck on the engineering and of course on the launch and the landing. We'll all be on the edge of our seats in twenty twenty seven and twenty thirty six to hear what you guys learned. So thanks very much for coming on our program and sharing the excitement of your science with us.
Pretty cool. I like what you said at the end about what it means to her to work on this.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is personal for both of them. You know, we say on this program a lot that science is driven forward by individual people with their curiosity, and clearly this is a big project with a lot of people working on it, but it's driven forward by their personal curiosity. You know, they want to know the answers to these questions. They have burning questions about the universe, and it's their curiosity that's pushing forward the envelope of human knowledge. And it's exciting to see that in action.
Yeah, because you know, it's sort of like sending a robot with cameras is probably just as good as sending a human with cameras, you know.
Except again, you don't have to bring the robot.
Back yet, you know, until our AI overdoords makers bring it.
Back, or maybe when we do eventually colonize Titan, we will find Dragonfly there pissed off and waiting for us.
Yeah, and it's going to be a nuclear arm so watch out. All right. Well, it's pretty exciting and it's a mission that's happening right now. You can sort of track it and follow its progress, I imagine, on the NASA website, so please check it out and send them good space vibes.
That's right, And one last fun little tidbit about this project is that it started over dinner on a napkin between two scientists coming up with this crazy idea. So you know, next time you have some crazy idea, it might just turn into like a huge billion dollar twenty year mission to a surface in the Solar System. So keep thinking and keep being creative.
Yeah, don't use napkins for wiping food off your mouth, just you know, keep them around in case you get cool billion dollar space ideas well. That was pretty exciting. Let's stay tuned and see what they find in twenty years.
I'm excited to see that first picture.
Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
Thanks for listening. I remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, But the people in the dairy industry are That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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