Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

How NASA’s Dragonfly mission will assess Titan for habitability

By

With the success of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, we’ll soon be seeing more robotic explorers which observe distant locations in the solar system from the air. Set for launch in 2034, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will be a robotic rotorcraft for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan — a location that is particularly intriguing because it is thought to be potentially habitable.

Titan has a thick atmosphere and low gravity, making it relatively easy for rotorcraft to stay in the air and explore the moon from above. The mission is particularly aimed at assessing the habitability of the moon by studying both its atmosphere and its surface, getting up close to areas that are hard to study from orbit due to the thickness of the atmosphere.

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.
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. NASA/JHU-APL

To enable this study, Dragonfly will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), and NASA has recently shared more information about this instrument and how it will operate. Similar to the system on board recent Mars rovers, this instrument is used for analyzing samples which will be collected by a drill called the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO).

Recommended Videos

Once DrACO has collected a sample, the mass spectrometer bombards it with energy so its molecules become ionized. The instrument can then sort these ions by their mass and charge, and then measure these sorted ions to show what the sample is composed of.

This means that DraMS will be able to tell what the surface of Titan is made of, for example. And the researchers are particularly interested in whether the surface has a chemical makeup that could lead to the formation of life.

“We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explained Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. “DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may be present on Titan, at their composition and distribution in different surface environments.”

This information will help us understand whether Titan could be potentially habitable and understand the chemistry that is required before life can evolve.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Watch how NASA plans to land a car-sized drone on Titan
An artist's impression of NASA's Dragonfly drone.

 

A decision by NASA this week paved the way for the Dragonfly drone mission to continue to completion.

Read more
NASA gives green light to mission to send car-sized drone to Saturn moon
An artist's impression of NASA's Dragonfly drone.

NASA’s Mars helicopter mission is now well and truly over, but following in its footsteps is an even more complex flying machine that's heading for Saturn’s largest moon.

The space agency on Tuesday gave the green light to the Dragonfly drone mission to Titan. The announcement means the design of the eight-rotor aircraft can now move toward completion, followed by construction and a testing regime to confirm the operability of the machine and its science instruments.

Read more
NASA needs a new approach for its challenging Mars Sample Return mission
An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has shared an update on its beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission, admitting that its previous plan was too ambitious and announcing that it will now be looking for new ideas to make the mission happen. The idea is to send a mission to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for study. It's been a long-term goal of planetary science researchers, but one that is proving costly and difficult to put into practice.

The Perseverance rover has already collected and sealed a number of samples of Mars rock as it journeys around the Jezero Crater, and has left these samples in a sample cache ready to be collected.  However, getting them back to Earth in the previous plan required sending a vehicle to Mars, getting it to land on the surface, sending out another rover to collect the samples and bring them back, launching a rocket from the planet's surface (something which has never been done before), and then having this rocket rendezvous with another spacecraft to carry them back to Earth. That level of complexity was just too much to be feasible within a reasonable budget, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced this week.

Read more