The new mission, called Dragonfly, will be equipped with a special instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS). It is intended to help scientists better understand the chemistry on Titan, as well as shed light on the chemistry that took place on Earth in the distant past and ultimately led to the formation of life.
The complex chemistry, inland ocean, and past surface liquid water make Titan an ideal location for studying prebiotic chemistry and a potentially habitable extraterrestrial environment.
“We want to know if a chemical process is occurring on Titan that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth,” explains Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Melissa Trainer is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist specializing in Titan. She also runs the DraMS instrument, which will scan Titan’s surface for evidence of prebiotic chemistry.
To achieve these goals, the Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will use Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between various points on Titan’s surface scattered several kilometers apart. This will allow the Dragonfly to move its entire toolbox to a new location when the previous one is fully explored and access samples in environments with diverse geological histories.
At each site, samples less than a gram in size will be drilled from Titan’s surface using a complex organics harvesting drill (DrACO) and delivered inside the lander’s main body to a place called the “attic” where the DraMS instrument is located. There they will be irradiated with an onboard laser or vaporized in an oven to be measured by DraMS. A mass spectrometer is an instrument that analyzes the various chemical components of a sample, separating these components into basic molecules and passing them through sensors for identification.
“DraMS is designed to study organic molecules that may be present on Titan, their composition and distribution in various surface environments,” said Melissa Trainer.
Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known life forms. They are of interest for the study of the formation of life.
Mass spectrometers determine what is in a sample by ionizing the material (that is, bombarding it with energy so that the atoms in it become positively or negatively charged) and examining the chemical composition of various compounds. This includes determining the relationship between the weight of a molecule and its charge, which serves as a characteristic.
DraMS was developed in part by the same team at Goddard that developed the Martian Sample Analysis (SAM) toolkit aboard the Curiosity rover. DraMS is designed to study samples of Titan’s surface material using methods proven on Mars using the SAM complex.
Melissa Coach highlighted the benefits of such a legacy. Dragonfly scientists didn’t want to reinvent the wheel when it came to finding organic compounds on Titan, and instead used established methods that had been used on Mars and elsewhere. “With this design, we have a very flexible tool that can be adapted to different types of surface samples,” said Melissa Trainer.
DraMS and other scientific instruments on the Dragonfly are being developed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the NASA mission and designs and builds the rotorcraft-lander.
Source: Goddard Space Flight Center
