When NASA's 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region—the mission's target touchdown spot—on Saturn's moon Titan in 2034, Cornell's Léa Bonnefoy will have helped to make it a smooth landing.

Bonnefoy and her colleagues assisted the future arrival by characterizing the equatorial, hummocky, knoll-like landscape by combining and analyzing all of the radar images of the area acquired by the Cassini spacecraft during its historic 13 year exploration of the Saturn system. They used radar reflectivity and angled shadows to determine the properties of the surface.

Effectively, it's a scene of sand dunes and broken-up icy ground.

The research, "Composition, Roughness, and Topography from Radar Backscatter at Selk Crater, the Dragonfly Landing Site," was published Aug.

Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti on Wednesday became the first European woman to take over command of the International Space Station during a ceremony broadcast live from space.

The outgoing commander, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, used the occasion to seemingly make a rare space-bound reference to the war in Ukraine, saying that "despite the storms on Earth, our international cooperation continues".

During a relaxed ceremony, Artemyev handed Cristoforetti a golden key, symbolising that she is the new commander of the space station until she returns to Earth on October 10.

Cristoforetti, a 45-year-old European Space Agency astronaut and former Italian air force pilot, arrived for her second tour on the ISS in April.

She holds the record for the longest stay in space by a woman after spending 199 days in orbit in 2014 and 2015.