Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle has devoted her career to exploring our solar system's nearby worlds. Her latest project is Dragonfly, a robotic rotorcraft-lander designed to explore Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
Why you should listen
Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the principal investigator of the Europa Imaging System on NASA's Europa Clipper mission. As the third female NASA planetary mission principal investigator in history, she leads Dragonfly, NASA's next New Frontiers mission -- and a bold, game-changing way to explore the solar system.
Dragonfly is an octocopter designed to explore the surface and atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, where chemical processes akin to those that led to life on Earth may be occurring today. Scheduled for launch in 2026, Dragonfly will arrive at Titan in 2034, where its investigations will help answer key questions about the origins of life on Earth -- and possibly elsewhere, too.
