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According to NASA, an upcoming mission to Saturn’s giant moon Titan will investigate the origins of life in the universe.
The Dragonfly mission is scheduled to launch in 2027 and arrive at Titan in 2034.
The Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS) on board will shed light on the types of chemical steps that occurred on Earth that eventually led to the formation of life, known as prebiotic chemistry.
According to mission officials, Titan’s abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination for studying prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.
DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface.
“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,” Dr Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
To accomplish this, the Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will take advantage of Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between various points of interest on Titan’s surface, which could be hundreds of miles apart.
This enables Dragonfly to relocate its entire suite of instruments to a new site once the previous one has been thoroughly explored, and it allows access to samples in environments with varying geologic histories.
Samples less than a gram in size will be drilled from the surface by the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO) and brought inside the lander’s main body, to a location known as the “attic,” which houses the DraMS instrument.
They will be irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporized in an oven to be measured by DraMS.
“DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may be present on Titan, at their composition and distribution in different surface environments,” Trainer said.
All known forms of life use organic molecules, which contain carbon. They are relevant to understanding the origins of life because they can be produced by both living and non-living processes.
Source:OCN
