Titan Week: CSTAR Distinguished Lecture for 2020

Dragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Titan’s Organic Chemistry and Habitability

Georgia Tech's Center for Space Technology and Research (C-STAR) hosts Titan Week, featuring days of virtual fun on Saturn's spectacular, intriguing moon, and NASA's plans to explore it. 

At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, CSTAR hosts Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, for its 2020 Distinguished Lecture. This year's virtual version will be via BlueJeans. 

Turtle is the principal investigator for NASA's Dragonfly mission, which proposes to use a rotorcraft lander to explore the environment of Titan.

NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide- ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly can fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling 150 km during a three-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.

Registration and other information for the 2020 Distinguished Lecture can be found here.

About Elizabeth Turtle

Dr. Elizabeth Turtle is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Her research focus is using remote sensing observations and numerical geophysical models to study geological structures and their implications for the surfaces and interiors of the planets on which they formed. The processes of interest include impact cratering and tectonics on terrestrial planets and outer planet icy satellites, mountain formation on Io, creep of ice-rich permafrost on Mars, and dynamics of lakes on Titan. Turtle is the Principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan and the Europa Imaging System  for NASA's upcoming Europa mission, an associate on the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem and RADAR teams, and a co-investigator on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.