NASA will fly your name to Saturn’s moon Titan if you sign up by Jan. 15

NASA is collecting names from the public to ride aboard Dragonfly, a rotorcraft headed for Saturn’s moon Titan, and the sign-up window closes at 11:59 p.m. EST on Jan. 15, 2027. Each participant receives a personalized electronic boarding pass, while the names themselves travel on a microchip aboard the spacecraft.

The day in tech, in one email: TLDR is the daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in startups, tech and programming.

Get TLDR →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.

The agency announced its public name-submission campaign in a news release dated Oct. 29. Dragonfly is scheduled to launch in 2028 and arrive at Titan in 2034, which means every submitted name will spend roughly six years in transit before the machine makes its first flight over another world’s surface.

Joining the passenger list before Jan. 15

Entering a name takes a single form. The agency’s news release points participants to a dedicated NASA sign-up page, where the submission produces the boarding pass as a keepsake. The only hard constraint is the clock: submissions must arrive before 11:59 p.m. EST on Jan. 15, 2027, a cutoff that falls about eleven weeks after the announcement, and the boarding pass is the proof of a place on the list. The chip is symbolic cargo rather than a scientific payload. It measures nothing and has no job beyond riding with the rotorcraft for the whole trip, which gives each participant a stake in a mission that will not reach Saturn’s system until late in 2034. Timing matters because the list closes while the spacecraft is still being built. The cutoff falls roughly a year and a half before the earliest July 2028 launch date on the mission page, so every name is fixed well ahead of the flight, and the boarding pass is the only receipt a participant holds until the rotorcraft is on its way.

Dragonfly, the 2028 launch and the 2034 landing

Dragonfly is a rotorcraft, a multi-rotor aircraft built to fly rather than roll. NASA’s mission page lists a launch no earlier than July 2028 and an arrival in late 2034, followed by a planned 3.3-year stay. Flights are planned at a pace of about one every one to two Titan days, each of which lasts roughly 16 Earth days. Selk Crater and the surrounding dunes are among the places the aircraft is meant to visit. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, is assembling the vehicle and leads the mission, and Elizabeth Turtle of that laboratory serves as principal investigator. The lab’s own Dragonfly site describes a car-sized, nuclear-powered octocopter that will cover more than 50 miles of organics-rich terrain, carrying what it calls the largest set of science instruments ever sent to another celestial body. It is the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages. That program covers principal-investigator-led planetary missions, a tier below the agency’s flagship class, and Dragonfly is the first of them designed to fly through the air of another world.

Participation is open to the general public, in the release’s words, and the boarding pass is a personalized electronic document. Media contacts listed in the release include Karen Fox and Molly Wasser at NASA Headquarters and Mike Buckley at the Applied Physics Laboratory, which shows how the communication effort is divided between the agency and the lab that leads the mission. The campaign arrives while the rotorcraft is still under assembly in Laurel, years before any launch countdown begins.

Titan as a laboratory for prebiotic chemistry

Titan is unusual among the solar system’s moons. According to the release, it has a thick atmosphere, rivers and lakes of liquid methane, dunes, and organic-rich material. NASA’s Titan page covers the moon’s background for readers who want more than the mission summary.

The environment explains the aircraft design. A thick atmosphere makes powered flight workable on Titan, and the mission page’s plan of one flight every one to two Titan days, each about 16 Earth days long, means long stretches on the ground sampling between hops. Liquid methane rivers and lakes and dunes give the team varied terrain to compare, and Selk Crater adds a site shaped by an impact. A planned 3.3-year stay after the late 2034 arrival would keep the submitted names on Titan until about 2038 if the schedule holds, which is the outer limit of what the chip can claim to have done.

After landing, Dragonfly will hop between sites and sample the ground at each, looking at prebiotic chemistry, meaning the chemical steps that came before biology. Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said the mission will astonish the public and that it will search for signs of habitability on a distant world she described as the most similar to Earth. Her statement frames the name campaign as a way to bring the public along for a mission that will take most of a decade to reach its destination.

One question remains open until the spacecraft is in flight: whether the 2028 launch date holds. The release calls it scheduled, and the mission page still lists it as no earlier than July 2028, so the names submitted by Jan. 15 will ship only when that date does.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

The day in tech, in one email: Get TLDR →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.