NASA’s Dragonfly: send your name to Titan by January 15, 2027

Your name can go where we ourselves will not: to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. NASA announced on Thursday, October 29, 2026 that it is opening the “Journey to Titan” campaign to the public and inviting anyone to register their name to travel aboard Dragonfly, the first flying science vehicle that will explore the surface of another world.

The process is simple. Participants go to the page the agency provided, go.nasa.gov/dragonfly-names, and register their name. In return they receive a personalised digital boarding pass honouring their place on the mission’s “passenger list”. The names will be stored on microchips aboard the spacecraft itself. The deadline expires at 23:59 US Eastern Time on Friday, January 15, 2027, around 06:59 on Saturday, January 16 in Greece. Boarding passes are also available in Spanish.

A rotorcraft for another world

Dragonfly is a rotorcraft, a vehicle with spinning rotors like a drone’s but designed to fly on another world. NASA presents it as the first science exploration mission with a rotorcraft. Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said: “NASA’s Dragonfly mission is simply going to leave you speechless. Flying the first science rotorcraft, NASA will explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, looking for signs of habitability on a distant world that is more like our own.”

Titan attracts scientists because of its composition. It has a thick nitrogen-rich atmosphere, rivers and lakes of liquid methane, extensive dunes and terrain full of organic material. Dragonfly is not a life-detection mission. As principal investigator Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) explains, it is a mission that examines “the chemistry that preceded biology here on Earth”. Prebiotic chemistry, the chemical processes before living organisms appear, will show which ingredients and conditions are needed for life to arise.

Launch in 2028, arrival in 2034

The spacecraft is being assembled at APL in Laurel, Maryland. Launch is planned for 2028, no earlier than July, and arrival at Titan for 2034. There, Dragonfly will make one flight every one or two Titan days (Tsol), each lasting about 16 Earth days. On each flight it will cover several miles and land at different sites, such as the dunes and Selk crater, to collect samples and analyse them with the instruments it carries inside. The mission’s planned duration on Titan is 3.3 years.

Dragonfly is designed and built under APL’s guidance, which leads the mission for NASA. It is the fourth mission of the New Frontiers programme, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate. It was selected in 2019. The team includes Lockheed Martin Space, NASA’s Goddard, Ames and Langley centres and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as the space agencies of France (CNES), Germany (DLR) and Japan (JAXA). NASA describes the mission on the Dragonfly page and the campaign in its press release.