'The mission designers and navigators are so good at this,' said Trident project systems engineer William Frazier, also of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The craft would then be able to spend 13 days studying the icy moon in 2038. If NASA selects the Trident mission to go ahead, the project - run from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California - would aim for a launch date in October 2025, when Earth's orbit will be best aligned with Jupiter's.Īrriving at Jupiter, the Trident craft would use the planet's gravitational pull to 'slingshot' directly to Triton. 'I've always loved the Voyager 2 images and their tantalising glimpses of this bizarre, crazy moon that no one understands,' she added 'Triton has always been one of the most exciting and intriguing bodies in the solar system,' said Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute director and principle Trident researcher Louise Prockter. This may help to reveal how active Triton really is and exactly how the surface - which is only around 10 million years old in a 4.6 billion-year-old solar system - keeps managing to renew itself and looks so unique.įinally, confirming if the moon does harbour a subsurface ocean - which the mission will achieve by probing Triton's magnetic field - will help improve our understanding of where water might and might not be found in space, and why. 'As we said to NASA in our mission proposal, Triton isn't just a key to solar system science - it's a whole key-ring.'Ĭertainly, the Trident mission would have plenty to do as it flies by the moon - from mapping the rest of the surface, assessing how much the plume-rich region previously seen by Voyager has changed. 'We know the surface has all these features we've never seen before, which motivates us to want to know "How does this world work?" 'Triton is weird, but yet relevantly weird, because of the science we can do there,' said Trident project scientist Karl Mitchell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'I've always loved the Voyager 2 images and their tantalising glimpses of this bizarre, crazy moon that no one understands,' she added. 'Triton has always been one of the most exciting and intriguing bodies in the solar system,' said Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute director and principle Trident researcher Louise Prockter. Triton also has a largely unmapped surface - only 40 per cent of the body was imaged by Voyager 2 - an inexplicably active ionosphere filled with charged particles, and an orbit path that moves in the opposite direction to its planet's rotation, unlike other large moons. The visuals of Triton left experts confused, as they showed a young, icy landscape that appeared to have been repeatedly resurfaced with fresh material - as well as 5.6-miles-high plumes of nitrogen gas and dust erupting from the surface.Įlsewhere in the solar system - such as on Saturn's moon Enceladus and possibly on Jupiter's moon Europa - plumes are believed to be caused by the release of material from a subsurface ocean. Back in 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 probe became the only spacecraft to date to have flown by the planet Neptune and its moon Triton, beaming back images as it did.
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