NASA plans to send mission to Neptune’s largest moon

After sending off probes to Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moon, NASA now aims to plan a mission to Neptune’s largest moon, which is expected to harbor life.

Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, was initially discovered back in 1846 and it is believed to be an ‘ocean world’ with liquid water that might even contain life, as believed by some scientists.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently proposed an idea, pending approval, to send up a spacecraft named ‘Trident’ to Triton with the objective of figuring out if it is a habitable place or not, according to Futurism.

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Also, Trident is also aimed to keep costs low, and the mission will roughly be the ‘price of a small mission to the moon’, as per the New York Times. “The time is now to do it at a low cost,” said Louise Prockter, principal investigator of the proposed mission. “And we will investigate whether it is a habitable world, which is of huge importance.”

Moreover, along with going over to Triton, the Trident will also visit Jupiter’s moon Io and stop by Venus. The last time people on Earth got a good look of Neptune was during a 1989 flyby of Voyager 2.

“We are comparing with the Voyager encounter in 1989, which was built on early 1970s technology, essentially a television camera attached to a fax machine,” said Karl Mitchell, the proposed mission’s project scientist, as quoted by the New York Times.