Speaker: Ralph Lorenz (Johns Hopkins University APL)

Title: The Dragonfly Mission to Titan

Abstract: Saturn's giant moon Titan has been revealed to be remarkably Earth-like,
with a landscape of vast dunefields, river channels and lakes under a smoggy
sky punctuated by methane downpours. Titan serves as a frigid laboratory
in which the same processes that shape our own planet can be seen in action
under exotic conditions. Titan has a rich inventory of complex organic
molecules that may provide clues how the building blocks of life are
assembled. NASA recently selected APL's Dragonfly mission concept as the
next $1B-class New Frontiers mission to launch in 2027, to arrive in the mid-2030s.
Dragonfly is an octocopter lander, able to repeatedly take
off and fly tens of kilometers in Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity to
sample the surface in a wide range of geological settings. This presentation will
describe the mission and its scientific investigations.

Bio: Dr Ralph Lorenz worked as an engineer for the European Space Agency on the
design of the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan, and as a planetary scientist
at the University of Arizona, and since 2006, at the JHU Applied
Physics Lab. His activities have centered on Titan, Cassini-Huygens and
future missions there, but his interests include Mars, dust devils, sand
dunes, planetary atmospheres and landscapes, and aerospace systems. He is
associated with NASA's InSight mission at Mars, the Perseverance rover, the Japanese Venus orbiter
Akatsuki, and is the Mission Architect for Dragonfly, NASA's next New Frontiers mission (a rotorcraft
lander for Titan). He is author or co-author of nine books
including 'Lifting Titan's Veil','Spinning Flight', 'Exploring Planetary Climate'
and 'Space Systems Failures', as well as over 300 journal publications.