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NASA is planning to launch a mission called Dragonfly in 2027 to explore Saturn’s moon called Titan. If the mission succeeds, it will open up our understanding of how life forms in the universe. The spacecraft will bring a tool which is known as the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS). This tool will help scientists learn more about the chemicals on Titan and look into how those same kinds of chemicals helped give birth to life on Earth.
Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, has special features like lots of chemical compounds containing carbon and even an ocean beneath its surface. What makes it really cool is that there was liquid water on the surface at some point! That’s why scientists are so interested in studying Titan; they want to learn more about chemistry leading up to life and if a place this far away could ever be livable.
DraMS will enable researchers on Earth to take a look at the different ingredients in the atmosphere of Titan. Dr. Melissa Trainer from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, wants to know if any chemistry similar to the one that happened on Earth before life first occurred can be found there too.
Trainer is an expert on the planet Titan and works on a mission called Dragonfly. She is in charge of a piece of equipment called DraMS which will be used to search for signs of chemistry that happened before life began on Titan.
Dragonfly is a special robotic copter that can fly through Titan’s atmosphere. Its mission is to explore different locations on the planet’s surface which can be up to several miles apart. That way, it can collect data and samples from varied geological settings.
At each site, a tiny sample of material will be drilled out of the surface by something called DrACO and brought inside the lander. There, it will be heated up by a laser or an oven so that it can be measured by an instrument called DraMS. This instrument works like a detective – it breaks down the sample into different molecules, passes them through sensors for identification and figures out what the sample is made of.
“DraMS is an experiment to look at the molecules that could exist on Titan. These molecules contain carbon, which is really important for living things. Scientists want to see if such molecules are made by natural processes and how they are spread across Titan.”
Mass spectrometers are special machines that can tell us what a sample is made of. It does this by shooting the material with energy and making the atoms inside it either become positive or negative, and then measure the weight of each molecule to figure out what it is. This lets scientists know the chemical makeup of any substance, as every molecule has its own unique ‘signature’.
If scientists have a sample from another planet and they want to know if it contains certain molecules, they use something called a mass spectrometer. This special tool helps them isolate the materials inside the sample so that they can take a closer look at what is really in there. You can watch this cool video from NASA Goddard’s Solar System Exploration Division to learn more about this helpful tool!
A team of scientists at Goddard created something called DraMS, and it is partially based on their work on the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite from the Curiosity rover. Using what they invented for Mars, the team made DraMS to explore special materials found only on Titan’s surface.
The teacher stressed the advantages of this development. Scientists at Dragonfly did not want to “start from scratch” when looking for natural substances on Titan, but rather based their research on already used strategies that have been tested and used elsewhere – like Mars. Trainer said, “This design has made it possible for us to create an instrument that can be changed quickly according to the different types of soil samples”.
The team of people working on the Dragonfly mission includes experts from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, CNES (Paris, France), Lockheed Martin Space (Littleton, Colorado), NASA Ames (Moffett Federal Airfield in California’s Silicon Valley), NASA Langley Research Center (Hampton, Virginia), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California), Penn State University (State College, Pennsylvania), Malin Space Science Systems (San Diego, California), Honeybee Robotics (Brooklyn, New York), DLR (Cologne, Germany) and JAXA (Tokyo, Japan). They are coming together to build special science machines and a rotorcraft-lander directed by Johns Hopkins.
NASA’s New Frontiers program is managed by their Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This program has four separate missions that focus on understanding the eye and its health. These missions include understanding how the eye’s goblet cells work to keep it healthy, looking into therapies for retinitis pigmentosa involving brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and examining the bacteria on the eye surface.
