NASA will put your name on a spacecraft bound for Saturn's largest moon. Under a campaign called "Journey to Titan", announced on October 29, anyone can submit a name to be stored on a microchip that will ride aboard Dragonfly, the rotorcraft NASA is sending to explore Titan by air.
Names go in at go.nasa.gov/dragonfly-names. In return, NASA says participants receive a personalized digital boarding pass. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. EST on January 15, 2027, according to the agency's release.
What you are actually signing up for
The mechanics are straightforward. According to the release, submitted names go on a microchip that rides aboard the Dragonfly rotorcraft as it explores Titan. What you keep is the digital boarding pass; what travels is your name on the chip.
The schedule is long, and worth knowing before you sign up. NASA says Dragonfly is scheduled to launch in 2028 and arrive at Titan in 2034; its mission page frames those as targets, with launch no earlier than July 2028 and arrival in late 2034. The rotorcraft is currently being assembled at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. APL leads the mission for NASA, and Dragonfly is being designed and built under APL's direction. Elizabeth Turtle of APL is the principal investigator.
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, framed the campaign in the release this way: "NASA's Dragonfly mission will simply blow your mind. By flying the first-ever rotorcraft science mission, NASA will explore Saturn's largest moon, Titan, as we search for signs of habitability on a distant world that is most similar to our own."
How Dragonfly works, and why Titan
Dragonfly is unusual because it flies. According to The Planetary Society's mission overview, the vehicle is about the size of a small car, with four arms each holding two stacked rotors, eight rotors in total. It runs on a nuclear power source similar to the ones on NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.
The logic of flying on Titan comes down to two numbers. The Planetary Society notes that Titan's gravity is about one-seventh of Earth's and its atmosphere is roughly four times denser, the combination that makes flight there possible. The distance adds a constraint: light takes over an hour to reach Titan, so Dragonfly has to plan and carry out its flights autonomously rather than being steered from the ground. The society says it will make short flights about once per Titan day, and that a Titan day or night each lasts about eight Earth days.
The destination is the point of the exercise. NASA's release describes Titan as a world with a thick atmosphere, rivers and lakes of liquid methane, sweeping dunes and a landscape rich in organic material. Once there, Dragonfly will fly to different locations and search for clues about prebiotic chemistry, which NASA defines as the chemistry that came before biology, to help scientists understand the ingredients and conditions for life.
The Planetary Society lists the first landing site as Shangri-La, a dune field near Titan's equator, and says the mission will also visit Selk crater, where the impact may have briefly created a lake of liquid water. Its instruments include drills that feed surface samples to a mass spectrometer, sensors to track the atmosphere through days and seasons, a seismometer for "Titanquakes", and cameras for scouting and public imagery.
The mission's place in NASA's program
Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate, according to the release.
The one date that matters now is January 15, 2027. After that, the next milestone is the launch itself, and NASA's Dragonfly mission page is the place to follow progress until then.
Reporting notes