Posted by Heba El-Sayed
Monday, March 20, 2023 04:00 AM
With the success of the Mars Helicopter creation, we’ll soon see more robotic explorers observing distant sites in the solar system from the air. Set to launch in 2034, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will be a robotic rover to explore Saturn’s moon Titan — a particularly interesting location. Because it is believed to be habitable.
Titan has a thick atmosphere and low gravity, which makes it relatively easy for rotorcraft to stay airborne and explore the moon from above.
The mission aims in particular to assess the habitability of the moon by studying both its atmosphere and surface, and to approach areas that are difficult to study from orbit due to the thickness of the atmosphere.
To enable this study, Dragonfly will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), and NASA recently shared more information regarding this instrument and how it works, Digitartlends reported.
Similar to the system aboard modern Mars rovers, this instrument will be used to analyze samples that will be collected by a drill called the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO).
Once DrACO collects a sample, the mass spectrometer bombards it with energy to ionize its molecules.
The instrument can then sort these ions by their mass and charge, and then measure these sorted ions to show the components of the sample.
This means that DraMS will be able to tell what the surface of Titan is made of for example.
Researchers are particularly interested in whether the surface contains a chemical composition that might lead to the formation of life.
“We want to know if the type of chemistry that might be important to Earth’s early prebiotic systems occurs on Titan,” Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explained in a statement. “DraMS is designed to look at organic molecules that may be present on Titan in their composition and distribution in different surface environments.”
