Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior.  The joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past.  These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a world habitable and about prebiotic chemical processes like those that led to the development of life here on Earth.  NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide-ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this carbon-rich extraterrestrial environment.  Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, sampling surface materials to measure their detailed compositions and observing Titan’s geology and meteorology.  During its ~3-year mission, Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at a few dozen landing sites in diverse geological settings to characterize Titan’s habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that have provided key ingredients for life.

Biography

Dr. Elizabeth (Zibi) Turtle is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and is the Principal Investigator of NASA’s Dragonfly New Frontiers mission to Titan and Principal Investigator of the Europa Imaging System (EIS) cameras on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.  She also participated in the Galileo, Cassini, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions.  She earned her PhD in Planetary Sciences from the University of Arizona, Tucson, and her BS in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In 2021, she was awarded the Claudia J. Alexander Prize by the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences.

Meeting details

All NOVAC members, guests, and the public are welcome to attend — no RSVP required.  You can attend the meeting virtually via Google Meet. Sign on at 4 pm to connect with fellow astronomers. The meeting starts at 4:30 with club information and general announcements. Program speaker starts at 5:00 pm.

We are NOT meeting at GMU for the April meeting

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Meeting Schedule

4:00 PM – Open participant discussion
4:30 PM – NOVAC news, announcements, and upcoming events
5:00 PM – Presentation

This program will be recorded and available a few days after the meeting on the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club YouTube channel