2023-05-15 10:00:00
Read this story in English here.
A new NASA mission to Saturn’s giant moon Titan will launch in 2027. When it reaches its destination in the mid-2030s, it will begin a journey of discovery that could lead to a new understanding of the development of life in the universe. This mission, called Dragonfly, will carry the Dragonfly mass spectrometer (DraMS) instrument, designed to help scientists focus on the chemistry that takes place on Titan. It could also shed light on the types of chemical steps that occurred on Earth, called prebiotic chemistry, that ultimately led to the formation of life.
Titan’s rich and complex chemistry, its carbon-rich interior ocean, and the past presence of liquid water on its surface make it an ideal destination for studying prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.
DraMS will allow scientists on Earth to remotely study the chemical composition of Titan’s surface. “We want to know if the type of chemistry that could have been important to the first prebiochemical systems on Earth would be occurring on Titan,” explains Dr. Melissa Trainer, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Trainer is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who specializes in Titan and is one of the Principal Investigators for the Dragonfly mission. She also leads operations with the DraMS instrument, which will analyze measurements of samples of Titan’s surface material for evidence of prebiotic chemistry.
To accomplish this, the Dragonfly robotic helicopter will take advantage of Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on Titan’s surface, which are several kilometers apart. This allows Dragonfly to move its entire suite of instruments to a new site when the old one has been fully explored, and provides access to samples in settings with a diversity of geological histories.
At each site, the Drill for the Acquisition of Complex Organic Materials (DrACO) will drill samples smaller than one gram away from the surface and deliver them inside the main body of the lander, to a location called the “attic”, which houses the DraMS instrument. There, they will be irradiated by 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 their basic molecules and passing them through sensors to identify them.
“DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that might be present on Titan, their composition, and their distribution in different surface environments,” Trainer says. Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known life forms. They are of interest for understanding the formation of life because they can be created by living or non-living processes.
The colorful globe of Saturn’s largest moon Titan passes in front of the planet and its rings in this natural-color image captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Mass spectrometers determine what is in a sample by ionizing the material (that is, bombarding it with energy so that the atoms it contains become positively or negatively charged) and examining the chemical composition of the various compounds. This involves determining the relationship between the weight of the molecule and its charge, which serves as a signal to identify the compound.
DraMS was developed in part by the same team at Goddard that developed the Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM) suite of instruments aboard the Curiosity rover. DraMS is designed to study samples of material from Titan’s surface in situ, using techniques put to the test on Mars with the SAM suite of instruments.
Trainer emphasized the benefits of this legacy. The Dragonfly scientists did not want to “reinvent the wheel” when it came to looking for organic compounds on Titan, and instead relied on established methods that have been applied on Mars and elsewhere. “This design has given us an instrument that is very flexible and can be adapted to different types of surface samples,” says Trainer.
DraMS and other science instruments aboard Dragonfly are being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the mission for NASA and is designing and building the helicopter-lander. The team includes key partners at the Goddard center; the French space agency (CNES in Paris, France), which is providing the Gas Chromatography Module for DraMS that will provide additional separation after leaving the oven; Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colo.; NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield in Silicon Valley, California; NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California; Penn State University at State College, Pennsylvania; Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California; Honeybee Robotics in Brooklyn, New York; the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, Germany, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Tokyo, Japan.
Dragonfly is the fourth mission of NASA’s New Frontiers program. New Frontiers is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Por Nick Oakes
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
#NASA #Instrument #Traveling #Titan #Reveal #Chemistry #Drives #Life