Hey, it's Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Today on the show, exploring the mysteries of new worlds in deep space. Planetary scientist and NASA veteran, Elizabeth Zibby Turtle studies new frontiers in the solar system, like rings and moons of other planets. In her TED 2020 talk, she draws us into her latest

mission called Dragonfly, which will explore the mysteries of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Picture a world with a variety of landforms. It has a dense atmosphere within which winds sweep

across its surface and rain falls. It has a dense atmosphere within which winds sweep across its surface and rain falls.

It has mountains and plains, rivers, lakes, and seas, sand dunes, and some impact craters.

Sounds like Earth, right? This is Titan. In August 1981, Voyager 2 captured this image

of Saturn's largest moon.

The Voyager missions have traveled farther than ever before, making the solar system and beyond

part of our geography. But this image, this hazy moon, was a stark reminder of just how much

mystery remained. We learned an exponential amount as the voyagers

flew by it, and yet we had no idea what lay beneath this atmospheric blanket. Was there an icy

surface with landforms like those of the other moons that had been observed at Saturn and Jupiter?

Or perhaps simply a vast global ocean of liquid methane.

Shrouted by the obscuring haze,

Titan's surface was a huge outstanding mystery

that Cassini Hoygens, an orbiter-lander pair launched in 1997,

was designed to solve.

After arrival in 2004, the early images Cassini sent back of Titan's

surface only heightened the allure. It took months for us to understand what we were seeing on the

surface. To determine, for example, that the dark stripes, which were initially so unrecognizable

that we referred to them

as cat scratches, were actually dunes made of organic sand. Over the course of the 13 years Cassini

...