BLAST OFF

New NASA Mission Will Send a Drone to One of Saturn’s Moons

The Dragonfly mission was selected as the winner of a “Shark Tank”-style competition to fund space projects.

NASA is sending a drone-style rotorcraft to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, the agency announced Thursday. The mission, dubbed Dragonfly, will involve the drone, which has a nuclear fuel source, taking scientific measurements of the moon, which has been compared to a primordial Earth, the New York Times reports. “We have the capacity, over the mission’s lifetime, to go hundreds of kilometers,” Elizabeth Turtle, who will lead the mission for the lab as its principal investigator, told the Times in April. “One of the advantages we have is that we can always scout the next site. We can fly ahead, look at it, see what kind of terrain there is, and decide whether we want to go there or elsewhere.” NASA last touched down on Titan in 2004 in a joint mission with the European Space Agency. Dragonfly’s mission was chosen in a Shark Tank-esque competition to fund space ventures less than $1 billion.