NASA's journey to Saturn's moon may reveal chemistry that gave rise to life

Washington: NASA has announced an upcoming mission to Saturn's enormous moon Titan with the goal of learning more about the origins of life in the cosmos.

In 2027, the Dragonfly mission is scheduled to lift off, and it will arrive on Titan in 2034.

Prebiotic chemistry, or the chemical processes that took place on Earth before the emergence of life, will be better-understood thanks to a device carried by Dragonfly called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS).

Titan's abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean, and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment, the mission officials said in a statement.

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 capitalise on Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on Titan's surface, spread as far as several miles apart.

This allows Dragonfly to relocate its entire suite of instruments to a new site when the previous one has been fully explored and provides access to samples in environments with a variety of geologic histories.

At each site, samples less than a gram in size will be drilled out of the surface by the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO) and brought inside the lander's main body, to a place called the "attic" that houses the DraMS instrument.

There, they will be irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporised 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.

Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known forms of life. They are of interest in understanding the formation of life because they can be created by living and non-living processes.

With inputs from IANS