On Thursday, NASA will announce its next major mission to explore the solar system. It will choose between two finalists:
Caesar, which would rendezvous with a comet and collect a pristine sample for study back on Earth;
Or Dragonfly, a quadcopter drone capable of soaring across the skies of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements.
The selected spacecraft will likely launch in 2026. The announcement will be presented at 4 p.m. Eastern time on NASA TV.
The missions have been under consideration for two-and-a-half years in NASA’s class of science missions, called New Frontiers, which are supposed to cost less than $1 billion. The competition, held between multiple institutions in government and academia, is not unlike a “Shark Tank” for deep space exploration.
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Earlier winners of the competition include the New Horizons spacecraft, which visited Pluto; Juno, which now orbits Jupiter; and Osiris-rex, which will soon collect a sample from the asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth.
The two missions NASA is now considering both build on previous journeys to deep space.
Titan, the target of Dragonfly, has long intrigued planetary scientists. On Christmas Day 2004, the spacecraft Cassini launched a probe, Huygens, to Titan’s surface, revealing a world analogous to a primordial Earth. It is the only world other than Earth with standing surface seas. Rather than water, however, Titan’s are filled with liquid methane.
Dragonfly is a rotorcraft similar to the four-propellor drones flown by hobbyists on Earth. If chosen for flight, it will canvas Titan, flying from one spot to another and collecting data. In only a few flights, it would cover more ground than a Mars rover might traverse in a decade. Part of the Dragonfly mission is to study whether the moon of Saturn could now be or once was home to life.
Alternately, Caesar — the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return mission — would collect a sample of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and return it to Earth for analysis.
If that comet’s name sounds familiar, the European Space Agency spent two years studying it during the Rosetta mission. That mission’s results would enable Caesar to fly to 67P with none of the pricey instruments otherwise necessary for scientific analysis. It will carry, essentially, only a sample collection arm and a canister for returning a preserved piece of comet to Earth.
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