Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 1 (Xinhua)-- NASA said that due to budget uncertainty, the launch date of the dragonfly mission to explore Titan has been postponed to July 2028.

Nicholas Fox, deputy director of NASA's Science Mission Council, issued a statement:

The Dragonfly mission is a very bold attempt, successfully overcoming many technical and planning challenges, and I am proud of this team and their ability to keep all aspects of the mission moving forward.

Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science department, attended a meeting of NASA's exoplanet Assessment Panel (OPAG) on Nov. 28. She said the main reason is that she is not sure how much money the project will have.

She added: "due to incredibly large uncertainties in funding and budget for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the APMC decided to postpone it".

CTOnews.com Note: the Dragonfly mission, originally scheduled for launch in 2027, is scheduled to launch into the sky of Titan in the mid-1930s.

Titan is the only moon in the solar system that has a dense atmosphere and a large amount of liquid on its surface, even if it exists in the form of hydrocarbons in oceans and lakes.

Huge sand dunes cover its tropics as a result of cosmic rays bombarding the ice on the satellite's surface.

Titan also has a vast equatorial desert, known as the Shangri-La Sand Sea, with occasional sandstorms. In this sense, Titan is also similar to Arakis in the dunes (I wonder if giant sand worms live).

The dragonfly (Dragonfly) is a dual four-rotor drone that will have eight rotors, each about 3.3ft (1m) long. With NASA's Ingenuity helicopter successfully flying over Mars, Dragonfly will become the second vehicle to fly in the alien world and the first to fly on an alien satellite.

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