NASA lets you send your name to Titan on the Dragonfly rotorcraft

You probably won't fly over the dunes of Saturn's largest moon, but your name can. On 29 October NASA opened "Journey to Titan", a public campaign that puts names on a microchip carried by Dragonfly, the rotorcraft that will explore Titan from the air.

How to take part

Sign up at NASA's official page, go.nasa.gov/dragonfly-names. Each participant receives a personalised digital boarding pass. The deadline is 11:59 p.m. EST on 15 January 2027, according to NASA's release. As with any space-themed campaign, use the official NASA link rather than a third-party site that asks for payment or extra personal data; the NASA sign-up itself is free.

What Dragonfly will do

Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA's New Frontiers programme and, as NASA puts it, the first science mission designed to fly and explore the surface of another world. The key dates from NASA:

• Now: the rotorcraft is being assembled at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
• 2028: planned launch.
• 2034: arrival at Titan.

Once there, Dragonfly will hop between sites to study Titan's very different environments. Titan has a thick atmosphere, rivers and lakes of liquid methane, wide dune fields and plenty of organic material. Scientists want to understand its prebiotic chemistry, the chemistry that comes before biology, to learn more about the ingredients and conditions that could lead to life.

"NASA's Dragonfly mission will simply blow your mind," said Nicky Fox, head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, inviting the public to come along. APL leads the mission for NASA, with Elizabeth Turtle as principal investigator; NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the New Frontiers programme.

Why fly on a rotorcraft

Flying lets Dragonfly cover far more ground than a wheeled rover, moving between sites that could be kilometres apart. NASA has done this before on a small scale with the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, but Dragonfly is a full science laboratory with rotors.

If you'd rather explore the solar system from your garden, our beginner telescope guide explains how to see Saturn and its rings, and binoculars for stargazing are an easy first step. For another long-haul NASA mission, read about Lucy reaching the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.