NASA Officially Greenlights $3.35 Billion Mission To Saturn's Moon Titan (arstechnica.com) 70
NASA last week formally approved a $3.35 billion mission to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone. "Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth." The mission has a launch date of July 2028. Ars Technica reports: After reaching Titan, the eight-bladed rotorcraft lander will soar from place to place on Saturn's hazy moon, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Dragonfly will be the first mobile robot explorer to land on any other planetary body besides the Moon and Mars, and only the second flying drone to explore another planet. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was the first. Dragonfly will be more than 200 times as massive as Ingenuity and will operate six times farther from Earth.
Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn's largest moon, and Titan's surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes. Titan's frigid temperatures -- hovering near minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius) -- mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan's methane lakes. Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan's surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes.
Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before," Turtle said in a statement. "The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."
Despite its distant position in the cold outer Solar System, Titan appears to be reminiscent of the ancient Earth. A shroud of orange haze envelops Saturn's largest moon, and Titan's surface is covered with sand dunes and methane lakes. Titan's frigid temperatures -- hovering near minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 degrees Celsius) -- mean water ice behaves like bedrock. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which flew past Titan numerous times before its mission ended in 2017, discovered weather systems on the hazy moon. Observations from Cassini found evidence for hydrocarbon rains and winds that appear to generate waves in Titan's methane lakes. Clearly, Titan is an exotic world. Most of what scientists know about Titan comes from measurements collected by Cassini and the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which Cassini released to land on Titan in 2005. Huygens returned the first pictures from Titan's surface, but it only transmitted data for 72 minutes.
Dragonfly will explore Titan for around three years, flying tens of kilometers about once per month to measure the prebiotic chemistry of Titan's surface, study its soupy atmosphere, and search for biosignatures that could be indications of life. The mission will visit more than 30 locations within Titan's equatorial region, according to a presentation by Elizabeth Turtle, Dragonfly's principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "The Dragonfly mission is an incredible opportunity to explore an ocean world in a way that we have never done before," Turtle said in a statement. "The team is dedicated and enthusiastic about accomplishing this unprecedented investigation of the complex carbon chemistry that exists on the surface of Titan and the innovative technology bringing this first-of-its-kind space mission to life."
Titan or Bust! (Score:2)
I do hope this doesn't eat into the Mars focus.
Re:Titan or Bust! (Score:4, Informative)
Why?
NASA's obsession with Mars is weird, and it consumes the lion's share of their planetary exploration budget. We know vastly more about Mars than we know of everywhere else except Earth.
This news here is bittersweet for me. I *love* Titan - it and Venus are my two favourite worlds for further exploration, and dragonfly is a superb way to explore Titan. But there's some sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas and the terrain sculpted by them near the poles. I REALLY wish they were going to the north pole instead :( In theory they could eventually get there, but the craft would have to survive far beyond design limits and get a lot of mission extensions. At a max pace of travel it might cover 600 meters or so per Earth day on average. So we're talking like 12 years to get to the first small hydrocarbon lakes and ~18 years to get to Ligeia Mare or Punga Mare (a bit further to Kraken Mare), *assuming* no detours, vs. a 2 1/2 year mission design. And that ignores the fact that they'll be going slower in the start - the nominal mission is only supposed to cover 175km, just a few percent of the way, under 200 metres per day. Sigh... Maybe it'll be possible to squeeze more range out of it once they're comfortable with its performance and reliability, but... it's a LONG way to the poles.
At least if it lasts for that long it'll have done a full transition between wet and dry cycles, which should last ~15 years. So maybe surface liquids will be common at certain points, rare in others.
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Why?
NASA's obsession with Mars is weird, and it consumes the lion's share of their planetary exploration budget.
Agreed, Mars is boring. NASA's obsession with it is weird. Especially given that with plausible near-future (a few decades, less than a century) advances in technology, a human colony on Venus is likely more sustainable and worth more in terms of scientific advancement than one on Mars. Venus and some of Jupiter's/Saturn's moons (e.g. Titan, Europa, Enceladus, Callisto, Ganymede) are by far the most interesting objects in our solar system. Expending significant effort and cost to place unmanned craft on
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Eh gads, people. Stay focused. Titan and Venus are impractical as colonization sites in the short term. Titan has too little gravity and is too far away, while Venus would require floating cities!
The obsession with Mars isn't "weird" in the slightest.
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The Moon is right next door. Thinking that we can pole vault to Mars before we can really even do more than crawl to our nearest neighbor is foolish.
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The reason people look to Mars is that it is more hospitable than the Moon and has greater potential to be made self-sufficient.
We really ought to be putting small mammals in centrifuges in orbit though, to get some data on whether or not our biology will function normally in .38g. It might be no better for our health than freefall.
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It's funny how we so strongly disagree further down in the comments, but I 100% agree with you here.
0,38g being largely fine for health is... I mean, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on it probably being true, but it's anything but guaranteed. There was a private project to test this, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite, but it ran out of funding; I'm not aware of any similar experiments that have been conducted. There've been a variety of attempts to simulate various gravity on Earth, such as having people li
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Aside from proximity, Mars is better suited to colonization than the moon.
There's a minor atmosphere that makes traditional flight possible, and evens out the temperature swings a bit.
The day/night cycle is nearly identical to Earth so solar arrays are more practical (compared to lunar days lasting 28 Earth days).
The gravity is higher (38% of Earth's gravity compared to 17%), so muscle atrophy and general disorientation should be less severe compared to the lunar surface. On the other hand this does make it
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Which is exactly what you want for prototyping. Work out the kinks close by where you can iterate designs quickly and have near real-time conversations with legions of engineers back on Earth. Then you can take all that experience and build something that has to work the first time and takes months or years to resupply.
So yes, Mars is a better colony location, but the Moon is a better t
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Mars' atmosphere is too thin for realistic passenger flight, it's just thick enough to be a PITA for both landing and taking off, any colony on Mars would have to be pretty self-sufficient right away since resupply is once every couple years, it's too far away and too big to supply anything useful to Earth, and is there actually a practical difference between 1/6 and 1/3 G?
Meanwhile the moon is close, made out of resources that would be useful for a space-based industry, and much easier to come and go from
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The current plan as I understand it, is to establish some rocket fuel manufacturing capability on the moon and use it as a jumping off point for other missions, particularly Mars. I'm not sure if SpaceX is planning to wait for that to happen before pushing on to Mars, though it is a main part of all those plans.
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Oh, goody, so we can pour four times the annual budget of NASA into the bottomless pit of war toys. Yippie skippy.
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Freedom is great and neglectable, until you very suddenly don't have it.
History has not ended. The world order that makes life nice and comfy for you is not a given into the future.
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Ukraine is not free, and never has been. Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty). The situation has only gotten dramatically worse since then, except of course for the political and economic elites in Kiev.
Israel has been claiming to be free and a democracy for 3/4 of a century, while enforcing living conditions on a very large portion of the people who live there even worse than the most mi
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Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.
This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.
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Venus's middle cloud layer is the most Earthlike place in the solar system apart from Earth**, is energy-abundant, has favourable orbital dynamics, easy entry, and the simple act of storing electricity for the night via reversible fuel cells - if plumbed in a cascade - can enrich deuterium (2 1/2 orders of magnitude more abundant on Venus), a natural export commodity, if launch costs are sufficiently low. The atmosphere contains CHONP, S, Cl, F, noble gases, and even small amounts of iron. Pretty much eve
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TL;DR.
That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes.
Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that. For Venus, that's a long ass way out.
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In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.
Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting wit
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That's a lot of text to not mention the need to build floating cities and not die on the surface, which even NASA has not been able to do for more than a few minutes
In case you didn't notice, NASA also hasn't built cities on Mars either, despite spending two orders of magnitude more money on it in recent decades than Venus.
NASA is getting there. But if it tried to do the same on Venus, it would take vastly longer.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Anyway, we don't need the most Earthlike atmosphere, we need to survive in an environment where we actually know how to do that.
Which requires creating Earthlike conditions. Starting with reasonably Earthlike conditions certainly is a good start.
And on Venus that means either A) surviving on the surface, which no one can do for more than a few minutes before shit implodes and burns or B) building floating cities, which would probably take another century of engineering and investment before we could do so reliably.
Maybe you are just saying stupid shit to be contrarian?
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It most definitely is not. Are you being deliberately obtuse?
You clearly didn't read anything I wrote, so why should I even bother responding? (A) Literally nobody was talking about settling the surface, and (B) It's been repeatedly pointed out that basically indefinite lifespans can be achieved for surface vehicles, as backed up by peer-reviewed research from NASA. And "christoban on Slashdot disagrees with peer-r
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So now NASA isn't working on getting to Mars and a fucking weather balloon is the same as a floating city on Venus.
I'm done with you.
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Colonization's extreme impracticality represents a critical loss of focus. This should have been apparent with the effective extinction of last century's manned lunar missions, as opposed to any evolution towards a lunar colony. Politicians would waste less money promising lab grown chicken meat in every pot and two flying cars in every garage.
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WTF are you blabbering about?
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NASA is stuck exploring where politicians and generals allow them to explore. The abandonment of the Moon exploration is what you get when you allow lawyers and soldiers to run an engineering program. There have been tons of paper printed with more interesting and important missions that they could be carrying out, but they can only spend the money Congress gives them the way that Congress tells them to.
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Don't worry, they've decided they need to get back to the moon right now because the Chinese are interested. There was a documentary on Netflix about it.
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Venus is not a valid colonisation target with current or foreseeable future technology.
Floating around in a bubble in an acidic atmosphere above a surface you will never reach for resource extraction limits you to an Earth-based supply chain. At least on Mars you can walk around and dig stuff up. On Venus you are crushed and melted.
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Counterpoint [slashdot.org].
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And that 'counterpoint' is hot garbage.
We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long. The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength, you're not mining anything even if you could build equipment that could survive there.
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The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.
You build of a thickness that the
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I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.
While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can e
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Dream on.
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...a human colony on Venus is likely more sustainable and worth more in terms of scientific advancement than one on Mars.
All we need to do is select an astronaut team from Phoenix.
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Venus is hot, but it's not *that* hot... ;)
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> sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas
Why is that? Is it to simplify communications? The lakes would certainly be more interesting.
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We can do more than one thing at a time. A government is composed of multiple people after all.
In terms of government pending, there's priorities but also diminishing returns. For example, you could try cutting everything except your top 3 items. But those top 3 items aren't necessarily going to get done faster or better proportional to massive amount spent. NASA's budget is about a third of a percent of the US federal budget. It's small potatoes, and yields a fair bit in return for science and education.
Re: Titan or Bust! (Score:2)
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I do hope this doesn't eat into the Mars focus.
It's more the other way, the Mars Sample Return blew out of the original budget so much, that it not only threatened this mission but also coming Venus exploration, practically wiping out any meaningful planetary exploration, however it's good to hear that NASA is planning to redesign MSR with a leaner budget keeping other missions to certain extent.
Just be careful, OK! (Score:3)
Be careful on the way back - any flies found in the spacecraft are to be examined instead of destroyed! And protect the giant snails from the methane lake!
10 internet points if you know the reference....
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Methane batteries?
https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
OK probably not.
units? (Score:1)
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It's cold out there in space.
Kelvin?
Second flying drone to explore another planet (Score:2, Insightful)
Technically Titan is a moon , not a planet.
Not that it makes the slightest different to how amazing this mission will be if it happens.
Re:Second flying drone to explore another planet (Score:4)
Planetary scientists frequently refer to moons that are large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium as planets in the literature. Examples, just from a quick search:
"Locally enhanced precipitation organized by planetary-scale waves on Titan"
"3.3. Relevance to Other Planets" (section on Titan)
"Superrotation in Planetary Atmospheres" (article covers Titan alongside three other planets)
"All planets with substantial atmospheres (e.g., Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan) have ionospheres which expand above the exobase"
"Clouds on Titan result from the condensation of methane and ethane and, as on other planets, are primarily structured by circulation of the atmosphere"
"... of the planet. However, rather than being scarred by volcanic features, Titan's surface is largely shaped..."
"Spectrophotometry of the Jovian Planets and Titan at 300- to 1000-nm Wavelength: The Methane Spectrum" (okay, it's mainly referring to the Jovian satellites as planets, but same point)
"Superrotation indices for Solar System and extrasolar atmospheres" - contains a table whose first column is "Planet", and has Titan in the list, alongside other planets
Etc. This is not to be confused with the phrase "minor planet", which is used for asteroids, etc. In general there's a big distinction in how commonly you see the large moons in hydrostatic equilibrium referred to as "planets" and with "planetary" adjectives, vs. smaller bodies not in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Amphibious? (Score:2)
Seems to have propellors and skids like a helicopter. Will it be able to swim through these methane lakes too?
I really hope so! Also seems like it would be really easy to slide into one.. or even just a deep puddle..
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Sadly it's being launched to near the equator, not the poles :( The geophysicists won out over the geochemists...
power (Score:3)
I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?
Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.
*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.
Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.
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Unfortunately, they still have to launch from Earth which is seething with them.
Wasn't that why Juno didn't use RTG? (that and the shortage of Pu238)
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Titan's atmosphere is rather calm; not an issue. At the surface, the winds measured by Huygens were 0,3 m/s.
You actually can use solar power in extreme environments - even Venus's surface has been shown to be compatible with certain types solar, though you certainly get very poor power density. Dragonfly, as noted above, uses an RTG.
Re: power (Score:2)
possibly dumb thought from someone who isn't involved in microbiology, space flight, or nuclear science
if this thing uses an RTG....
lets say it lands and, although unlikely, finds smoking gun evidence of bacteria or something else "alive"
is it possible to shield the rtg enough to prevent radiation contamination of this environment?
i thought rtgs were kinda leaky devices and it would suck if we killed or mutated or poisoned the first alien life that the human race ever encountered
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This is a myth possibly originating with The Martian, where the main character goes to great lengths to bury his RTG. That was silly, he should have used the thing as a foot warmer in the hab, and to charge his iPod.
They're potentially dangerous if you crack them open and munch on the plutonium inside, but they're generally also designed to survive reentry intact so good luck with that.
https://atomicinsights.com/mar... [atomicinsights.com]
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That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.
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The foundational premise was that 'stuff's blown about by the Martian wind'.
https://www.quora.com/Are-ther... [quora.com] is a long thread.
Re: power (Score:2)
ive never seen the movie, not much of a movie guy
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It's going to use a RTG.
Very cool (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got to admire how cool this is.
Just 50 years ago, we thought dropping things on a one-way trip onto another planet/moon was the coolest thing ever (and was hard to do - the Soviets spent 20 years getting a probe onto Venus, for example). Now they're talking about self-flying robots that will pootle about on the surface of a body far further from us, for *years* looking around, sending super high quality pictures and all sorts of other information.
Probably the best thing is that this sort of project is the foundation upon which my kids will grow up. They may well not go into cutting edge fields such as space exploration, but even still, that things like this are now the "base" of technology gives them such a lot more to work with.
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Your kids will stare into a screen, cell phone or something that has replaced them, all their lives and never do anything useful.
\o/ (Score:1)
$3.35B - is that their profit margin or total cost of the project - obviously prior to the application of the over-budget multiplier:Math.random()* 18
Video, please! (Score:1)
Terraforming on the same trip (Score:1)
taking along a bunch of Methane-metabolizing bacteria (methanotrophs) to heat it up comfy for the next visit?
Despite the unfortunate lack of an oxidizer on Titan, anaerobic methanotrophs, might happily reduce sulfates (SO4^2-), nitrate (NO3^-), or metal oxides like ferric iron (Fe^3+) or manganese dioxide (MnO2) in case it is available there. There certainly should be enough Nitrates given the atmosphere is full of it.
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Metabolized with what oxidizer?
It's just the opposite - methane on Titan is like nitrogen on Earth; it's things like acetylene and free hydrogen that are the potential energy sources, and to a lesser extent the more common (but less reactive) higher mass alkanes, etc.
The main problem is that LAWKI isn't even remotely compatible with existing in the cryogenic environment of Titan. There are a lot of interesting alternative chemistries, but they require basically redesigning life from scratch. We're simply
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ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.
And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here [wikipedia.org]. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.