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France participates in Nasa’s Dragonfly mission to explore Titan

18 mars 2022

The Observatoire de Paris - PSL is pleased with the official entry of France in the space mission Dragonfly, announced on March 14, 2022 by the CNES and the CNRS, in a press release. Its teams within the Laboratory of space studies and instrumentation in astrophysics, are indeed involved in this ambitious project intended to return on Titan.

At the beginning of 2022, CNES and NASA signed a cooperation agreement on Dragonfly.

Dragonfly is the fourth space mission in the U.S. "New Frontiers" program, selected in 2019 by NASA. [1]

Dragonfly
© NASA/JHU

Intended for the exploration of Titan, the largest of Saturn’s satellites, Dragonfly will be launched in 2027, with a landing and start of operations planned for 2034. The nominal duration of the mission is set at two and a half years.

The last visit to Titan by a space probe was in 2005, with the European lander Huygens of the Cassini.

A drone at the heart of the mission

The heart of the mission is a drone weighing several hundred kilograms that will fly over the surface of Titan : at least a dozen different geological sites, over a distance of 175 kilometers.

Its main objective is to search for and identify a wide range of organic compounds and prebiotic chemical processes in atmospheric and surface samples. All these clues could allow, by comparison with the Earth, to understand how life could have developed on our planet.

French contribution

Led by the Laboratory of Atmospheres, Media and Space Observations (LATMOS, CNRS/University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines - Paris Saclay/Sorbonne University), the main French contribution concerns the design and construction of the DraMS-GC system, a gas chromatograph that is part of DraMS (Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer)}. This instrumental set will allow chemical analysis either by laser desorption or by gas chromatography, coupled to a mass spectrometer. These two modes of analysis will allow to search and identify a wide range of organic compounds and potential biosignatures (traces of life) in atmospheric and surface samples.

At the Paris Observatory - PSL

With a strong background in the study of giant planets and the scientific exploitation of data from the Cassini-Huygens mission, the Laboratoire d’études spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique (Observatoire de Paris - PSL / CNRS / Sorbonne Université / Université de Paris) is participating in this new mission.

  • It will provide the thermal and mechanical architectures of DraMS-GC, the gas chromatograph of DraMS.
  • It will also contribute to the thermal tests under vacuum and in Titan’s environment, using its test facilities.

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[1] In addition to Dragonfly, the American "New Frontiers" program already includes the missions : New Horizons (first flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto), Juno (placed in orbit around Jupiter) and OSIRIS-REx (mission to return samples from an asteroid)

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