NASA tools may disclose the chemistry enabling life on Titan.

 

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. Credits: NASA/JHU-APL

Titan is a great place to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment because of its abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and historical presence of liquid water. DraMS will allow researchers to examine the chemical composition of the Titanian surface remotely.

 

Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere will allow the robotic rotorcraft Dragonfly to travel between various points of interest on Titan’s surface, some of which could be several miles apart. As a result, Dragonfly can relocate its entire instrumentation and gain access to samples in environments with various geologic histories.

Titan's complex, carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and historical presence of liquid water make it a great location to research prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment. Researchers will be able to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface thanks to DraMS.

 

The robotic rotorcraft Dragonfly will be able to move between different points of interest on Titan's surface, some of which may be several miles apart, thanks to Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere. Because of this, Dragonfly is able to relocate all of its equipment and access samples in settings with different geologic histories.

We are interested in finding out if Titan is experiencing the kind of chemistry that might be crucial for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth, according to Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere will allow the robotic rotorcraft Dragonfly to travel between various places of interest on Titan's surface, some of which could be several miles apart. This makes it possible for Dragonfly to move its complete instrumentation and access samples in locations with various geologic histories.

 

The different chemical components of a sample are examined by a mass spectrometer by dissolving them into their basic molecules and putting them through sensors for identification.

By ionizing a sample (hitting it with energy to make the atoms positively or negatively charged) and examining the molecular makeup of the different molecules, mass spectrometers can identify what is in it. This entails figuring out how the weight and charge of the molecule interact to create a unique mark for the compound.


The purpose of DraMS, according to Trainer, is to examine the makeup and distribution of the organic molecules that might be present on Titan.

 

The Goddard team that designed the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite for the Curiosity rover also contributed to the development of the DraMS instrument suite. Using methods created for the SAM suite on Mars, DraMS is intended to scan samples of Titanian surface material in situ. It is a tool for study that looks at the organic molecules on Titan, which are essential to all known life.

The trainer emphasized the advantages of this lineage. The researchers on Dragonfly did not want to "reinvent the wheel" when looking for organic compounds on Titan. So they concentrated on tried-and-true techniques that were already in use on Mars and elsewhere.

Trainer stated, "This design has given us a very adaptable instrument that can accommodate the various types of surface samples."

 

The initiative is managed and designed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA. It is in responsibility of designing and constructing DraMS and other science instruments for Dragonfly, as well as the rotorcraft-lander.

 

The French space agency (CNES, Paris, France), which supplies the Gas Chromatograph Module for DraMS, which will offer an extra separation after leaving the oven, is one of the team's main collaborators.

Reference: techexplorist.com


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