NASA says SpaceX will launch its Dragonfly mission to Saturn

Nov. 26 (UPI) -- NASA has announced it selected Elon Musk's SpaceX to provide launch services for its ambitious Dragonfly mission that will place a rotorcraft lander at Saturn's moon of Titan as part of its New Frontiers Program.

Dragonfly's current launch window is from July 5 to 25, 2028, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rotorcraft-lander will sample various sites on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, to determine its composition in different geological settings.

"The nuclear-powered rotorcraft will look for prebiotic chemical processes common on both Titan and on Earth before life developed," SpaceX said in a statement on Twitter.

The cost of NASA's launch contract with SpaceX is $256.6 million.

"Dragonfly's scientific payload will characterize the habitability of Titan's environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry on Titan, where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Saturn's moon," NASA said in a statement.

Dragonfly is being managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and has engineers, scientists and technologists who have deep space experience around the solar system from the sun to Pluto.