NASA's Dragonfly Mission To Titan Could Shed Light On Processes That Led To Life On Earth

Titan has a complex carbon-rich chemistry, and harbours an interior ocean. The past presence of liquid water on the surface of Titan makes it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes

NASA's Dragonfly mission, which is due to launch to Saturn's giant moon, Titan, is expected to shed light on the chemical processes that occurred on Earth that led to the formation of life. Chemical processes that lead to the formation of life are studied under a branch called prebiotic chemistry. 

The Dragonfly mission, which will launch in 2027, and arrive at Titan in the mid-2030s, will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS). 

This device will help scientists understand the chemistry at work on Titan. 

What makes Titan an ideal location to study prebiotic chemistry?

Titan has a complex carbon-rich chemistry, and harbours an interior ocean. The past presence of liquid water on the surface of Titan makes it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.

How will the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer work?

DraMS is a rotorcraft-lander which will take advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity to explore dozens of locations across the icy world. It will also collect samples of Titan's organic surface materials and measure them to characterise the habitability of Titan's environment and investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry.

With the help of the information gathered by DraMS, scientists on Earth will be able to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface. 

In a NASA statement, Dr Melissa Trainer of the space Agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the aim of NASA is to understand if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan. 

Trainer, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist, is one of the deputy principal investigators of the Dragonfly mission, and the lead on the DraMS instrument. 

DraMS will fly between different points of interest in Titan's surface to search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry. Since DraMS can fly, it can relocate its entire suite of instruments to a new site after the previous site has been fully explored. The Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO) instrument atop DraMS will drill out samples less than a gram in size, at each site. DrACO will place the samples inside a region called the "attic", where an onboard laser will irradiate the samples, or vaporise them in an oven. DraMS, being a mass spectrometer, will measure the samples. 

A mass spectrometer separates various chemical components of a sample down into their base molecules and passes them through sensors for identification. A mass spectrometer ionises the material by bombarding it with energy so that the atoms inside it become positively or negatively charged, and examines the chemical composition of the various compounds, to determine what is present inside a sample. The instrument determines the relationship between the weight of the molecule and its charge, which serves as a signature for the compound. 

Trainer said DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may be present on Titan, at their composition and distribution in different surface environments. The reason why organic molecules are of interest in understanding the formation of life is because they contain carbon and are used by all known forms of life, and can be created by living and non-living processes.