This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft lander approaching a site on Saturn’s exotic moon Titan. Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across the icy world sampling and measuring the composition of Titan’s organic surface materials to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry. This is the 1st of 22 slides portraying NASA’s Koolest space science missions in reverse order from futuristic to historic. Click on title immediately below for this MUST SEE
Titan’s atmosphere contains carbon-based molecule
Scientists were surprised to find a carbon-based molecule in the thick atmosphere around Saturn’s moon Titan and describe it in The Astronomical Journal. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array detected the presence of cyclopropenylidene, which has been found in the Taurus Molecular Cloud but not in any other atmospheres in the Milky Way, researchers say.
