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Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute |
NASA has announced a new mission to Saturn's largest moon,
Titan, which is set to launch in 2027 and could reveal groundbreaking
information about the universe's development of life. The Dragonfly mission
will be equipped with an innovative instrument called the Dragonfly Mass
Spectrometer (DraMS), which will assist scientists in examining the complex
chemistry present on Titan's surface. The DraMS instrument may also provide
insight into the prebiotic chemistry that occurred on Earth, ultimately leading
to the formation of life.
Titan is an ideal location for studying prebiotic chemical
processes and extraterrestrial habitability due to its rich complex carbon
chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface.
DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely analyze the chemical
composition of Titan's surface material, with a focus on determining whether
the type of chemistry that could have led to early pre-biochemical systems on
Earth is occurring on Titan.
Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Maryland, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who specializes
in Titan, and one of the Dragonfly mission's deputy principal investigators,
will lead the DraMS instrument. The Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will utilize
Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between various points of
interest on Titan's surface, enabling it to relocate its entire suite of
instruments to new sites when the previous one has been fully explored.
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This illustration shows NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft-lander approaching a site on Saturn’s exotic moon, Titan. Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across the icy world, sampling and measuring the compositions of Titan's organic surface materials to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL |
At each site, the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics
(DrACO) will extract samples less than a gram in size from the surface and
bring them inside the lander's main body to a location called the
"attic," where the DraMS instrument is housed. Samples will be
irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporized in an oven and measured by DraMS.
The mass spectrometer will analyze the chemical components of each sample by separating
them into their base molecules and passing them through sensors for
identification.
DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may
be present on Titan and their composition and distribution in different surface
environments. Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known forms
of life. They are of interest in understanding the formation of life because
they can be created by both living and non-living processes.
DraMS was developed by the same team at Goddard that created
the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the Curiosity rover.
Dragonfly's scientists did not want to "reinvent the wheel" when it
came to searching for organic compounds on Titan, so they built on established
methods that have been applied on Mars and elsewhere.
The DraMS instrument and other science instruments on
Dragonfly are being designed and built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the mission for NASA and is
designing and building the rotorcraft-lander. The team includes key partners at
Goddard, the French space agency (CNES, Paris, France), Lockheed Martin Space,
Littleton, Colorado, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Langley Research Center,
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Penn State University, Malin Space Science
Systems, Honeybee Robotics, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and the Japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Dragonfly is NASA's fourth mission in the New Frontiers program and is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate Washington. When Dragonfly arrives at Titan in the mid-2030s, it will embark on a journey of discovery that could lead to a new understanding of the universe's development of life.