NASA’s Dragonfly Will Fly Around Titan Looking for Origins, Signs of Life, NASA
“NASA has announced that our next destination in the solar system is the unique, richly organic world Titan. Advancing our search for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will fly multiple sorties to sample and examine sites around Saturn’s icy moon. … Titan is an analog to the very early Earth, and can provide clues to how life may have arisen on our planet. During its 2.7-year baseline mission, Dragonfly will explore diverse environments from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater where liquid water and complex organic materials key to life once existed together for possibly tens of thousands of years. Its instruments will study how far prebiotic chemistry may have progressed. They also will investigate the moon’s atmospheric and surface properties and its subsurface ocean and liquid reservoirs. Additionally, instruments will search for chemical evidence of past or extant life. … “With the Dragonfly mission, NASA will once again do what no one else can do,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “Visiting this mysterious ocean world could revolutionize what we know about life in the universe. … evidence of past liquid water, organics – the complex molecules that contain carbon, combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen – and energy, which together make up the recipe for life. … Dragonfly will visit a world filled ith a wide variety of organic compounds, which are the building blocks of life and could teach us about the origin of life itself.” … The moon’s weather and surface processes have combined complex organics, energy, and water similar to those that may have sparked life on our planet. … and exploring a near-Earth asteroid for the building blocks of life,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.”
Keith’s note: Look at these multiple references to one of the prime tasks of Dragonfly – to search for organic compounds on Titan due to their relevance to the possibility of life. Once again, for those of you who have not been paying attention: NASA has an astrobiology program and this is what it does. I was in the auditorium at the Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) in Seattle when this was announced. A loud cheer went up (see video below). With all this blatant relevance to topics key to Astrobiology and broad enthusiasm for the mission from the Astrobiology community you’d think that NASA SMD and NASA PAO would use the word “astrobiology” at least once or link to the NASA Astrobiology program webpage. Guess again. Alana Johnson from PAO is listed as a contact on this press release. She attended the entire Astrobiology Science Conference. Either she was not paying attention to the topic of the meeting or she had no influence on the wording of this press release.
NASA complains that people do not understand the scope and breadth of its programs. Small wonder when NASA so effectively and deliberately ignores some of its own programs the way that it ignores “Astrobiology”.
– NASA Leads The World In Astrobiology. Wow, Who Knew?, earlier post
– NASA Can’t Figure Out What Astrobiology Is – Or Who Does It, earlier post
– NASA Is Incapable Of Explaining How It Does Astrobiology, earlier post
– NASA’s Astrobiology Program Works Hard To Ignore Itself, earlier post
– NASA’s Astrobiology Programs Ignore One Another, earlier post
– NASA Leads In Astrobiology. It Needs To Act That Way., earlier post
Watch the excitement at #AbSciCon2019 as we watched the announcement of the selection of #DragonFly a mission to #Titan by #NASA! #Astrobiology woooo!!! pic.twitter.com/KIC4Lff4MP
— Julia DeMarines (@LifeNspace) June 27, 2019
With that many opportunities but no go, the omission/avoidance of the term in such a release MUST be intentional. Even incompetence is a hard sell for this one.
Why avoid the term? Did somebody decide it had too many syllables?
Or perhaps it sounds TOO sci fi…
Or maybe somebody has an issue with it being considered an actual scientific discipline at all and they don’t want to give it any legitimacy by using the label.
Missions typically go way out of their way to write goals they can achieve. At the end of the mission, they have to go through that list and say, “Yes, yes, yes,,, We accomplished all of our goals. 100% success.” The logic behind may be very contorted, but some people consider anything less than 100% to mean the mission was a partial failure. If you list anything about biology in the goals, and then don’t end up seeing something alive, you would be on thin ice. Look at that list of astrobiology-sounding goals. Every one of them is a guaranteed success. Study organics? We know they are there to be studies. Look for clues about the origin of life? Clues is a pretty vague word, so it’s easy to say you found some sort of clue. And, technically, if you don’t you can definitely say you looked for one. This is the sort of programatic nonsense you get from an institution which likes to think it never fails.
That makes sense. It is always better to under promise and than over perform. Also they are probably remembering how interest in Mars seemed to drop off when the Viking Landers “failed” to find life. It was over 20 years before another mission was sent to the Mars surface.
Riddle me this. Could the avoidance of that term be because the notion of life elsewhere violates the Biblical assumptions of the southern congresspeople on whom NASA funding depends?
The vast majority of folks, including most Christians, take it for granted that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. The reasoning is that God wouldn’t make it and leave it empty. Just look at how few noticed the Allen Hills announcement.
More likely it’s the reluctance by the scientists themselves given the media circus followed by attacks by other scientists when a claim is made that life is found, as with the Viking missions and the Allen Hills meteorite. They know that the only evidence that will be accepted is life clearing reproducing in a test tube on Mars with 100% proof it’s not from Earth or some similar high bar of proof. And that will be very difficult to achieve without researchers at least working in at a lab in the Mars system if not actually on its surface.
Such a possibility seems contrary to the immediate rather blatant evidence: the announcement uses the term ‘life’ directly at least nine times, and the context is unmistakably that of seeking out life (or the progenitors of life) ‘elsewhere’. The term ‘astrobiology’ is hardly more challenging a phrase than ‘life’ to a fundamentalist’s creed.
While I disagree with Dr. M’s statement (…most ‘take it for granted’ that life exists elsewhere) at face value, the gist of his point is valid. Most are open to the possibility of it existing elsewhere (God gets to make the universe the way he wants to, after all; besides, ‘taking it for granted’ would be unscientific; just another of those ‘frightful givens’ that Ian Malcolm spoke of in Jurassic Park) and see nothing wrong with looking for such evidence.
Dr. M may be right, too, in line with fcrary’s suggestion below, that it’s a matter of trying to control expectations. This seems more plausible, but…
…it remains a curious conundrum: the statement says ‘look for evidence of life, life, life, life elsewhere’….but it NEVER utters the actual name of the research discipline whose very purpose IS to look for evidence of life elsewhere. Talk about a strange conspiracy…
Take a closer look at those statements about life, or at least the ones Keith highlighted in the quoted text. None of them actually say anything about looking for evidence of life. Looking for the “building blocks” of life; “search for chemical evidence of past or extant life”; improving our understanding of how life “may have arisen on our planet”, etc. I can’t find a single mention of life that says they actually plan to measure anything which is alive, or are searching for anything alive. Even something like chemical evidence of life isn’t saying they will look for something actually alive, just something inanimate which life might have produced. This is not a life detection mission, and they don’t want to claim it is. At the same time, talking about life in the universe is definitely the sort of exciting thing you want in a press release. The Europa Clipper has also done this sort of verbal tap dancing.
But as well as not committing to a bug hunt, they are also probably worried about funding and congressional support. Not for religious reasons, although I’m sure there is some sect somewhere who doesn’t like the idea. But people in the field (if they are old enough) do remember Senator Proxmire and his “golden fleece” awards. Some people are comfortable saying they study the origin of life, or prebiotic chemistry, but keep their head down when the subject of actually looking for extraterrestrial life comes up.
All of the statements/investigation avenues, and I think this was Keith’s original observation, fall under the purview of the nascent scientific discipline of Astrobiology. All those things are what astrobiologists DO. And nobody is blind to the reality that they (members of the field of astrobiology) are ultimately searching for past, present, and/or the potential of extraterrestrial life. It comes close to providing the entry you’d expect to find under the definition of astrobiology in a dictionary!
You can regurgitate the specific wording and imagine that it’s carefully written to avoid saying that they’re ‘searching for life’, but how such chosen wording (laced with life, life, life in the context of a distant-space probe) differs impressionistically from the mere label ‘astrobiology’…begs a more precise explanation. Besides, even one of the statements you quote exactly states that they are looking for evidence of currently existing life, i.e., , “…chemical evidence of past or extant life.”
The notice describes a good chunk of astrobiology, including some rationales of its methodologies. Why avoid using the inclusive TERM that covers what is described right there on the page? This is the question.
Let me try again. Dragonfly will be incapable of detecting life. Two of the instruments, the camera and meteorological package, provide zero information on the subject. (Well, unless something crawls through the camera’s field of view…) The other two, the mass spectrometer and the gamma ray spectrometer, measure chemical composition. That can tell you quite a bit about organic chemistry. It might tell you that the chemistry is consistent with something life might have produced. But that would not be unique and that isn’t detecting life. The talk about life is largely hype. The mission will be excellent science independent of anything related to astrobiology.
You might say “impressionistically” all those words about life are no different from saying “astrobiology”, but there are two main differences. They don’t commit the mission to doing something it just can’t do, and “life” only has one syllable (which does matter to some people in press statements like this.)
But that’s the point: they ARE committing the mission to doing ‘astrobiology’ with what they describe…because that’s what astrobiologists investigate/study/analyze. The field of astrobiology doesn’t only seek to ‘detect life’.
Please help me: How (& in what dictionaries) are you reading into the word ‘astrobiology’ the sole objective/task/process of spotting living, breathing (so to speak) organisms? [This seems to be what you are claiming is the problem with using the specific term.]
As for worrying about the five extra syllables…I hardly think one listing of the term would over-burden this rather extensive announcement.
Well, my dictionary defines astrobiology as “the branch of biology concerned with the study of life on earth and in space.” (That’s the dictionary which comes installed on a MacBook Pro, version 2.2.1, if you care.) You can’t study life without having life to study. Organic chemistry is very important to astrobiology (any sort of biology, for that matter), but it’s chemistry not biology. I also don’t claim mathematics textbooks are about physics, despite the fact that you can’t do physics without math. This mission is about studying the chemistry of Titan, and that’s very organic chemistry and it’s something an astrobiologist would care about. But it isn’t biology, in and of itself, and it’s important science for reasons other than astrobiology.
It might seem like a fine point, but it actually matters to some people. If the Administrator of NASA says this mission is about biology, someone will point out that it has no instruments which can “study… life” (as that dictionary definition says.) And someone like that is going to question why NASA is fund a mission that can’t do what the Administrator said it was supposed to do. Now, if he says it’s about complex, organic chemistry and complex, organic chemistry is important to astrobiology, that’s a whole different matter.
As far as using five syllable words, I’ve had that argument with NASA media relations people, and they definitely think it’s a problem. The media give more coverage to stories which are easier for them to write. Easy to write means being able to use direct quotes, rather than paraphrasing or explaining. Anything an average sixth grader couldn’t understand has to be paraphrased or explained (and I’ve heard media relations people make exactly that statement.) And explaining is a problem, because readers don’t want to be lectured to. The news, from this perspective, should be written as clear, obvious statements which follow from what the reader already knows or believes. I disagree completely, but the media relations people seem to think following that logic is essential to getting as much press coverage as possible, and that’s what they apparently consider their job to be about.
Thank you for elaborating.
As for what you describe with NASA media relations…such is one of the underlying causes for NASA’s poor public engagement. They arrogantly presume (a) the public doesn’t want explanations and (b) the public can’t understand anything technical. However, that is not syllable counting.
This isn’t unique to NASA (although it may be more of a problem for them than other organizations) and I’m not sure I’d blame the media relations people too much. They are correct about what modern news services are interested in publishing. They even have statistics to prove it. Just look at the technical content and level of detail in most news reports on other topics. Say the 737 MAX mess. That’s not very accurate and not very detailed, outside of trade journals like Aviation Week.
What they should be doing, in my opinion, is trying to overcome that media prejudice against technical content and explanations. But that would make their job much, much harder. And it probably would hurt their performance metrics at annual reviews.
(Note that, in all this, I’m assuming the media relations people were involved in preparing the statements from those senior officials. I think that’s a safe bet.)
Polls repeatedly shows that 3 out of 4 Americans believe ET are/have visted the Earth and the government is hiding it. They are not going to be impressed with astrobiologists finding bacteria on Mars, or care about NASA searching for it. Indeed, they will just be wondering why it took NASA so long to finally tell them the “truth”.
https://www.usnews.com/news…
Most Americans Believe Government Keeps UFO Secrets, Survey Finds
Survey for National Geographic finds extraterrestrial visits not that crazy an idea to most Americans.
By Seth Cline, Staff Writer June 28, 2012, at 1:48 p.m.
-More than three quarters (77 percent) of those surveyed believe there are signs that aliens have visited Earth, and over half (55 percent) think Men in Black-style agents threaten those who report seeing them.
Its why I suspect NASA doesn’t use the term Astrobiology because its worried more about how scientists in other fields of biology will respond. Scientists tend to be very conserative about their own field of study, which goes with the skeptical (prove it!) approach that makes for good science.