NASA announced a partnership with SpaceX for an exploration mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The American space agency has awarded a $256.6 million contract to Elon Musk’s company for the launch of the Dragonfly mission, scheduled for July 2028 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Dragonfly It is the fourth mission of NASA’s New Frontiers programwith a total budget of approximately $3.35 billion. The spacecraft, the size of a Martian rover and powered by nuclear energy, is designed to fly like a drone and analyze the composition of Titan’s surface.
The mission aims to study thehabitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the possible presence of past life on this moon of Saturn. According to NASA, Dragonfly will analyze “the progression of prebiotic chemistry on Titan, where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed over a prolonged period.”
Titan is the second largest moon in the solar systemknown for its dense atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane and ethane. The Dragonfly mission will take six years to reach Saturn’s moon and will stay there for about two and a half years, exploring several sites on its surface.
The collaboration for Dragonfly underlines the increasingly important role of SpaceX in NASA’s ambitious missions beyond Earth orbit. Elon Musk’s company is already working on a lunar lander derived from Starship for the Artemis III mission, expected by September 2026.
SpaceX recently expressed its intention to increase the frequency of launches of its Starship rockets to 25 per year starting in 2025. These spacecraft are considered critical for future lunar and Martian exploration.
Source: www.tomshw.it
