ABSTRACT

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 within its interior. The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed surprisingly Earth-like geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on Titan's surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a singular destination to seek answers to fundamental astrobiological questions about the habitability of other worlds in our solar system and prebiotic chemical processes like those that led to the development of life here on Earth. This talk will include an overview of Titan and the exploration planned with NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission. Dragonfly 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, exploring diverse geological settings to sample and measure detailed compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology. During its ~3-year mission, Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at a few dozen landing sites to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that have provided key ingredients for life.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Elizabeth (Zibi) Turtle is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. She is the Principal Investigator for the Dragonfly New Frontiers mission to Titan and for the Europa Imaging System (EIS) cameras on the Europa Clipper mission. She also participated in the Galileo, Cassini, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. Dr. Turtle's research has focused on combining remote-sensing observations with numerical geophysical models to study geological structures and their implications for planetary surfaces, interiors, and evolution, including: tectonics and impact cratering on terrestrial planets and outer planet satellites, the thickness of Europa's ice shell, the formation of Io's mountains, and the nature of Titan's landscape and weather. 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.