NASA TV - MUST COURTESY

Greenbelt, Maryland - 27 June 2019

++SOUNDBITES COVERED BY ANIMATION AS INCOMING++

1. SOUNDBITE (English) Jim Bridenstine, Administrator of NASA:

"I am proud to announce that our next New Frontiers mission Dragonfly will explore Saturn's largest moon Titan. Dragonfly will be the first drone lander with the capability to fly over a hundred miles through Titan's thick atmosphere. Titan is unlike any other place in our solar system and the most comparable to early Earth. The instruments onboard will help us investigate organic chemistry, evaluate habitability and search for chemical signatures of past or even present life. This revolutionary mission would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. A great nation does great things. We will launch Dragonfly to explore the frontiers of human knowledge for the benefit of all humanity."

2. Animation of Dragonfly drone (PARTIALLY COVERS UPCOMING SOUNDBITE)

3. SOUNDBITE (English) Curt Niebur, NASA Lead Program Scientist for New Frontiers:

"One of the great things about Dragonfly is with the cameras that it has looking forward and downward as dragonflies flying over the surface it's going to be taking pictures and sending those back to Earth. So, we will actually get the experience as if we are riding along with Dragonfly looking down at this alien yet very familiar kind of surface that has these rivers and mountains and I think that's going to be a tremendous experience for the public. And I think everybody's really going to enjoy it."

4. Animation of Titan (PARTIALLY COVERS UPCOMING SOUNDBITE)

5. Animation of Dragonfly drone (PARTIALLY COVERS UPCOMING SOUNDBITE)

6. Animation of Saturn and Titan (PARTIALLY COVERS UPCOMING SOUNDBITE)

7. Animation of Titan's surface (PARTIALLY COVERS UPCOMING SOUNDBITE)

8. SOUNDBITE (English) Curt Niebur, NASA Lead Program Scientist for New Frontiers: ++CAMERA SHOTS CHANGES DURING SOUNDBITE++

"The ultimate goal is to get to Selk crater which is a really large crater on Titan it's about 50 miles across. And we want to get there because we think that at Selk crater the three ingredients you need for life were mixed together and that mixing is very important because when that impactor came in it created a lot of debris and mixed them all together. So we want to get Dragonfly to that crater so we have a chance to directly investigate what happens when you mix those three things together. Because the great thing about Titan is it's very similar chemically to the to Earth before life evolved and we can't go back in time on Earth and learn the lessons about the chemistry that eventually led to life, but we can go to Titan and we can pursue those questions and look at that chemistry and get a glimpse into what those conditions were like that eventually led to life on Earth."

FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: apus119498

NASA announced Thursday that it's is sending a drone called Dragonfly to explore Saturn's largest moon Titan.

Using propellers, the spacecraft will fly from location to location on the icy moon to study whether it can support microbial life.

The mission is part of NASA's competitive New Frontiers program, the same program that sponsored the New Horizons spacecraft that brought us the first images of Pluto.

The Dragonfly beat out nearly a dozen other proposed projects, including its chief competitor project to collect samples from a nearby comet. It's slated to launch in 2026 and arrive at Titan in 2034.

"The ultimate goal is to get to Selk crater which is a really large crater on Titan it's about 50 miles across. And we want to get there because we think that at Selk crater the three ingredients you need for life were mixed together said Curt Niebur, NASA Lead Program Scientist for New Frontiers.

Titan is a haze-covered world with a thick atmosphere that covers a strangely Earthlike surface. The moon has lakes of methane, mountains of ice and a water ocean below the surface, making it an attractive place to explore whether its environment can support primitive life.

"The great thing about Titan is it's very similar chemically to the to Earth before life evolved," Niebur said.

He said, "We can't go back in time on Earth and learn the lessons about the chemistry that eventually led to life but we can go to Titan and we can pursue those questions."

Titan was last studied by the international Cassini-Huygens mission. In 2017, the Cassini spacecraft plunged into Saturn, ending two decades of exploration.