NASA's Titan Dragonfly will touch down on a field of dunes and shattered ice

According to a new analysis of radar imagery, the mission will touch down on a terrain of dunes and shattered, icy bedrock.

In 2034, there will be a helicopter that will explore Titan from the air. According to NASA, its range will be much greater than that of a wheeled rover. It will explore an area hundreds of miles or kilometers over the course of two years. However, before taking to the sky on its own, Dragonfly must first arrive on Titan under a parachute, soft-landing on frozen terrain that is hidden from easy viewing by the dense hydrocarbons that fill the moon's atmosphere.

The Shangri-La dune field is close to the 50 mile-wide crater, Selk. A team of scientists, led by planetary scientist Léa Bonnefoy of Cornell University, took a new look at the data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft to produce the most accurate assessment of the landing site.

Bonnefoy said in a statement thatDragonfly is going to a scientific remarkable area. The dragonfly will land in a dry area. It rains liquid methane occasionally, but it's more like a desert on Earth with dunes, mountains and impact craters.

In the video, you can see the drone practicing for a mission to the strangest moon in the universe.

Selk is an interesting place. The impact that carved it out would have melted the local ice and caused interactions between the fresh liquid water and organic molecule present on the surface. Astrobiologists are interested in the chemistry that involves carbon-rich molecule but not living things.

The area's radar images are limited, with the resolution at best being 1000 feet. There are a lot of small rivers that we can't see.

Thanks to the European Space Agency's Huygens lander, which piggybacked on board Cassini before parachuting down to the surface of Titan in 2005, scientists know that there are rivers on the planet. The temperatures of these rivers are too cold to hold liquid water. Liquid methane and ethane rain from the cold sky and wash off the water-ice bedrock that feeds large lakes.

Multiple viewing angles are what the imagery provided. It viewed landmarks in the region of Dragonfly's landing site from a variety of angles, ranging from 5 degrees to 72 degrees.

Bonnefoy's team was able to determine the topography of the region within the limits of the image resolution by analyzing how the terrain produced different-shaped shadows.

The scientists found that the Selk crater's rim is higher than expected because it is less eroded.

The research was published in a journal.

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