This recent decision by NASA will enable the mission to progress through its next stages: from finalizing its design to construction, followed by testing of the entire spacecraft and on-board instruments.
Scheduled to lift off in July 2028, the Dragonfly mission’s main scientific objective is to study the conditions under which the chemical building blocks of life are formed in an environment other than Earth.
Arrival on Titan is scheduled for 2034. In situ, a half-ton drone, will embark on a hundred-kilometer journey from its landing site in the equatorial dunes to the Selk crater two years later. In this ancient impact crater, liquid water (mixed with organic matter) is thought to have subsisted for a few hundred or a few thousand years.
The aim is to go into this area to collect and analyze soil samples to find out if there were more complex molecules than elsewhere, due to the presence of liquid water, which could have led to the development of prebiotic chemistry and, in particular, amino acids.
On the way to Selk crater, numerous soil samples will be taken. Dragonfly will use several instruments to analyze the chemical composition of the soil and atmosphere, and determine the properties of Titan’s atmosphere and subsurface.
Chief among these instruments is the DraMS mass spectrometer, which will analyze the composition of several samples collected at the drone’s various landing sites.
The contribution of Observatoire de Paris - PSL
The Laboratoire d’études spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique is participating, under the responsibility of the Laboratoire Atmosphères & Observations spatiales at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and in collaboration with CNES, in the development of the DraMS-GC (Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer and Gas Chromatograph subset, which couples a mass spectrometer with chromatography columns to carry out an in-depth study of the organic molecules present on Titan’s surface.
