Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in our solar system with an appreciable atmosphere. Atmospheric conditions allow methane to play the same role as water does on the Earth: a hydrological cycle of liquid hydrocarbons creates landscapes on Titan’s surface that are familiar to our terrestrial experience. But Titan’s atmosphere also hosts processes that are more akin to processes of Early Earth before life made its mark on our planet. Energetic particles drive photolytic destruction of methane and a plethora of subsequent reactions whose end products we can only begin to constrain. How complex the end products of this chemistry can become and what happens to them once they reach Titan’s dynamic surface remains a mystery after Cassini’s 13-year exploration of the Saturn system. In fact, we still don’t even know the specific composition of the compounds sitting on Titan’s surface. 

Dragonfly, NASA’s most recently selected New Frontier’s mission, is a rotorcraft lander designed to explore Titan’s surface and address these outstanding mysteries. In over 3 years of in situ exploration, Dragonfly will sample a variety of terrains by flying from the organic rich sand dunes to the water ice rich impact crater Selk. In this talk, we’ll discuss why some of the outstanding questions at Titan require in situ exploration, how Dragonfly is designed to rise to the challenge, and how the anticipated data will shed light on our understanding of prebiotic chemistry across the solar system.