Word: cassini
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...Cassini probe, which was launched from Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004, had a big job to do: principally, studying the planet's elaborate ring system and taking a census of its litter of moons - of which 53 have been found and named. Of those, Enceladus, discovered in 1789, held some of the deepest secrets. (See pictures of Saturn...
...Potential plume sources on Enceladus are an active area of research," says Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif...
...Cassini helped advance that research when it endeavored to determine the composition of the exhaust in the most straightforward way possible: by flying through it and registering the thousands of high-speed pellets that collided with its skin. The speed and density of the pellets confirmed that they were ice. Analyzing the precise composition of that ice has taken years, but the results, published this week in the journal Nature, were worth the wait...
...only is the ice made of ordinary water, but it's salt water, with sodium turning up in the samples no matter how many times the ring material was retested. "Our measurements imply that besides table salt, the grains also contain carbonates like soda," says Frank Postberg, a Cassini scientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. (See a photo-essay of the world's most competitive space programs...
...book on Enceladus is by no means closed, and Cassini has two more flybys of the moon scheduled for November. Scientists aren't expecting to find proof of biology there anytime soon - but now, at least, they've got a good reason to look...