[P-PS01] Outer Solar System Exploration Today, and Tomorrow

[PPS01-02] Titan's interior and seismic observations with the Dragonfly mission

★Invited Papers

*Angela G Marusiak¹, Mark Panning², Andrea Bryant³ (1.University of Arizona, 2.NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 3.University of Chicago)

Keywords:Titan, Seismology, Dragonfly, Interior Structure

The Dragonfly mission is a New Frontiers-class NASA mission due to launch to Titan in 2028. Titan is a unique world, as it is the only moon with a significant atmosphere which will allow Dragonfly to fly to multiple landing sites. Titan’s surface is likely composed of water ice, and possibly methane clathrates. Clathrates could be responsible for resupplying atmospheric methane, and contributing to Titan’s hydrocarbon cycle. Part of Dragonfly’s scientific payload includes the DRAGMet instrument suite, and includes geophones and a more sensitive short-period sensor. These seismic instruments will be tasked with detecting and characterizing seismic activity, as well as helping to investigate Titan’s interior structure.
Here, we present an overview of how Dragonfly could determine Titan’s icy shell structure, including investigating how thick a methane clathrate layer could be on Titan. We created self-consistent geophysical models, made by the opensource code PlanetProfile. These models are then used to generate synthetic seismograms using AxiSEM and InstaSeis. The synthetic seismograms allow to investigate how clathrates can influence the thermal and seismic profiles of Titan, and help us determine how the Dragonfly mission can recover the icy shell structure.