NASA’s Dragonfly Mission: Exploring the Potential Chemistry of Titan

NASA’s Dragonfly mission is scheduled to launch in 2028 and land a rotorcraft on Titan, a moon of Saturn, to study environments unique within our solar system. Titan has a dense and cold atmosphere (-180 degrees Celsius; -295 degrees Fahrenheit), a methane and ethane “hydrologic” cycle similar to the water cycle of Earth, and a “bedrock” composed of primarily water ice. Importantly for the Dragonfly mission, the surface of Titan is thought to host sand dunes composed of complex organic matter. Understanding what types of prebiotic compounds exist on Titan, including in the organic dunes, may lead to a better understanding of the organic compounds that existed on early Earth. The Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), developed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will be the primary means of determining the composition of such organic compounds on Titan. Join Dr. Joseph (Joey) Pasterski, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at NASA Goddard, as he provides an overview of Titan and the Dragonfly mission, including how and why DraMS will be used to study the organic composition of Titan, and how his research may help to characterize the chemistry of the outer solar system and early Earth.


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