November 4, 2025 GRAA Luncheon
American Legion Post #136
6900 Greenbelt Road
Greenbelt, MD 20771
Dragonfly: Flights of Exploration on an Exotic Ocean World
The speaker for the November 4, 2025 Goddard Retirees & Alumni Association (GRAA) luncheon was Alex Pontefract, an astrobiologist and assistant project scientist for Dragonfly, a NASA spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2028 that will send a robotic rotorcraft to explore the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
Dr. Pontefract is interested in habitat generation through impact bombardment, life in cold and salty environments, as well as life-detection techniques and instrumentation. Her research focuses on microbial communities in hypersaline planetary analog environments, exploring how ionic strength and water activity influence the habitability of the system, as well as the stability of biosignatures on Mars and ocean world relevant brines, and the role these events may have played with regard to prebiotic chemistry and the origins of life in our solar system, specifically on the early Earth, Mars, and Titan.
Dr. Pontefract has a B.Sc and an M.Sc. in Biology from McMaster University and a Ph.D. in Geology (Planetary Science) from Western University and has served on the Network for Life Detection Steering Committee.