After “re-booting” the moon and establishing a base there, followed by dispatching expeditionary crews to Mars, where should humanity go?
Next month, a first-of-its-kind gathering will blueprint an eventual crewed trek to tantalizing Titan, the largest of Saturn‘s many moons. That inaugural “Humans to Titan Summit” will make the case for an astronaut outing to that far-off moon, detailing the science goals and concepts of human missions to Titan as well as necessary forerunner robotic efforts.
And there is already a robotic Titan mission on the books — NASA’s nuclear-powered Dragonfly octocopter mission, which is targeted to launch in 2028. Could it help fuel a human leap?
Foundational talks
“It’s not too soon to begin thinking about this,” said Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. She is also president of the advocacy group Explore Titan and co-author of “Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets” (Pantheon Books, 2016).
“The idea of the summit is to bring together people from different communities — engineers, scientists, industry, academia, robotic and human spaceflight experts,” Hendrix told Space.com. “We’re having foundational talks about what precursor missions do we need in order to get us on the road to Titan, eventually with humans.”
Hendrix noted that, after Apollo‘s last human foray to the moon in 1972, there was a gap of decades, a lull in launching astronauts beyond Earth orbit — a pause just filled by NASA’s recent Artemis 2 mission, which sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth.
“Now we are, hopefully, back on track [with] humans going to the moon, with NASA talking about Mars as the next human destination,” said Hendrix. “I think having a concept in our mind after Mars can guide our thinking, give us a path and keep us motivated for the future.”
Visits, past and future
The Saturn moon has had visitors already. On Jan. 14, 2005, the European Space Agency‘s robotic Huygens probe — part of the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn — touched down on Titan.
Making a 2.5-hour descent through Titan’s atmosphere, the Huygens probe provided a stream of data for 72 minutes once on the moon’s surface. It set the still-standing record as the most distant landing from Earth.
“Huygens showed us many things,” Hendrix said. She cited the dynamics of Titan’s atmosphere, the look of its surface — which features water-ice “rocks,” dry river beds, lakes and dunes — as well as the overall haziness at the landing locale.
“It does look otherworldly,” Hendrix said.
Next up for Titan is Dragonfly, now scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028 for a six-year voyage to Titan. Once landed, the craft will spend three years flying from spot to spot to investigate a range of sites, perhaps revealing its potential to host life.
A dynamic world
“Dragonfly is an awesome, super-important mission to a fascinating and active world,” said Hendrix. “Titan is not a static place. It is a dynamic world,” she said, “probably a place that’s very close to an early-Earth kind of environment.”
Dragonfly will give us a leg up in the effort to send humans to Titan, Hendrix said, “but there’s still a lot to do and learn.”
“Ultimately, we’re trying to get humans on the surface and living there. I think that’s doable in the long-term, for sure,” she said. A precursor mission might involve robotic orbiting of Titan — perhaps even a human crew circuiting the Saturn moon. Radar and infrared scanning of its surface could be done, she said, along with gauging what impact Titan’s changing seasons have on the moon’s atmosphere.
“A lot can be done, and should be done, robotically. But with humans on the surface, there’s work only humans can do,” Hendrix said.
Surmountable issues
So, how best to strut the right stuff on Titan?
First, there’s more atmospheric pressure than here on Earth. “You don’t need a pressure suit like you do on the moon or Mars. What you do need to do is keep warm. It’s very cold there. There’s also a little more gravity than the Earth’s moon,” said Hendrix.
Because of Titan’s atmosphere, “you can strap wings to your arms and move through the atmosphere under your own power, or strap on a jet pack and power yourself around. You’ve got that atmosphere and low gravity. There are many options for transport on Titan, which Dragonfly is taking advantage of,” Hendrix said.
Also, you’d have to make your own oxygen, Hendrix said, which is not available in Titan’s thick, nitrogen atmosphere laced with methane. A Titan-based habitat would need a power source. And, given the precipitation of molecules and gunk that rains down and settles on the surface, there’s a need to protect equipment, she said.
“This is all surmountable,” said Hendrix, saying that Dragonfly and other precursor missions could yield information useful for human visits to Titan.
The Humans to Titan Summit 2026 is being held June 11-12 in Boulder, Colorado. The goal is “to explore the concept of Titan as the next human exploration destination after Mars, how it could be done and what we would need to do now,” according to the event’s website.
“We want the workshop to invigorate the community to think about what we need to do and what the possibilities are … to plant the seed that this is a real possibility,” Hendrix concluded.
