Building the UV Laser for the Dragonfly Mission

My main project that I have worked on at NASA has been developing the "THANOS" (Throttled Hydrocarbon Analysis by Nanosecond Optical Source) laser for NASA's Dragonfly Mission. Dragonfly will be a drone lander to Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Its a wildly ambitious mission that will search for the building blocks of life on the surface of Titan - and be able to fly to new locations/areas of interest. See the video below for more mission details. The laser that I have been building along side an amazing team at NASA Goddard operates in the UV spectrum, at 266 nm - and will be used to perform sample analysis on collected Titan soil. This laser's design was invented at NASA and we have been ruggedizing it for deep space, autonomous operation for the past several years - achieving some pretty incredible requirements. We built the Engineering Test Unit (ETU) laser - which went through Vibration Testing, Thermal Vacuum, radiation, shock and a variety of other testing conditions to ensure that it will not only survive the launch, but also the ~7 year cruise to Saturn and landing on Titan. We successfully completed all necessary testing on the ETU version of the laser and in 2025 we have been completing the flight unit. Most of the year, Titan is over 1 billion kilometers away from Earth, so we really want to get it right the first time so we don't have to go all the way out there to fix it! Please see all of the publicly available papers on the development of this system - and reach out if you need any more information. To Titan!

The Laser Optics Box for the THANOS laser being environmentally tested

This shows the size of the target for the sample cup we need to focus the laser down on to.