How did life develop in the universe and is Earth the only place it did? NASA doesn’t dodge the big questions like these – it exists in large part to try to answer them – and the space agency has a mission in the works called Dragonfly to try to answer what may be the two biggest questions of all.
Saturn’s giant moon Titan is the mission’s destination. The launch is planned for 2027 and the plan is to study the distant moon’s chemistry after a series of dragon fly-like hops across the surface to gather samples. Managing the program building Dragonfly is NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
Scientists are counting on Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to allow the robotic rotorcraft to hop to interesting sites as far as several miles apart. At each site, Titan will drill into the surface and remove samples less than a gram in size to bring inside the lander. There, they will be “irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporized in an oven” for study, NASA said. A mass spectrometer will analyze each sample looking for organic molecules – those with carbon – that are shared by all living things we know about.
This should sound familiar to NASA followers. Similar methods have been used on Mars and elsewhere to analyze surface samples. “This design has given us an instrument that’s very flexible, that can adapt to the different types of surface samples,” said Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Dragonfly will be the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program. That program is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.