Science Goals and Objectives for the Dragonfly Titan Rotorcraft Relocatable Lander

NASA’s Dragonfly mission will send a rotorcraft lander to the surface of Titan. Dragonfly’s science themes include investigation of Titan’s prebiotic chemistry, habitability, and potential chemical biosignatures in both liquid water (as might occur in the interior mantle ocean, in cryovolcanic flows, and/or in impact melt) and in liquid hydrocarbon (within Titan’s lakes, seas, and/or alkanofers). Consideration of both of these solvents simultaneously led to the targeting of Titan’s dunes and interdunes to sample organic sediments and water ice respectively. Ultimately, Dragonfly’s traverse target is 80-km Selk Crater, where we seek previously liquid water that had mixed with surface organics. Our science goals include determining how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed on Titan and what molecules and elements might be available for such chemistry. We will also determine the role of Titan’s tropical deserts in the global methane cycle. We will investigate the rates and processes modifying Titan’s surface geology and constrain how and where organics and liquid water can mix on and within Titan. And we will search for chemical biosignatures indicative of past or extant biological processes. As such, Dragonfly is the first NASA mission to explicitly incorprate searching for life into its mission goals since the Viking landers in 1977.