Word: enceladus
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...probably home to a globe-girdling ocean beneath a thin rind of ice, and its Jovian sisters Callisto and Ganymede appear to be icy and wet too. Now, according to new findings by the Cassini spacecraft, one more name can be added to the list of water worlds: Enceladus, a small moon orbiting Saturn. What's more, Enceladus' water might be unusually hospitable to the emergence of life. (See the 50 highs and lows of space exploration...
...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...
This spring three of the rugged ships stand out from the rest. Near Saturn, the Cassini orbiter, launched by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just executed a dramatic dive through an icy geyser that reaches 950 miles (1,530 km) into space from the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and there are plans to follow that up with even higher-risk maneuvers. In May NASA's Phoenix Lander will set down in Mars' arctic region in search of water ice. And later this month NASA and the European Space Agency will retire their Ulysses solar surveyor after a 17-year mission that...
...orbiter's plume dive was responsible for some of that shifting. Passing just 120 miles (190 km) above the surface of Enceladus, Cassini sampled an icy exhaust that researchers didn't even know existed until the spacecraft spotted it three years ago. NASA expects to release detailed composition information soon, but the ice hints at subsurface water and the attendant possibility of life. Seven more close-brush flybys are in the offing, including one high-wire plunge that will drop the spacecraft a scant 15 miles (24 km) above Enceladus' surface. Says JPL's Spilker: "We're going to taste...
Hansen-Koharcheck and her colleagues are hopeful about their prospects of better understanding the structure of Enceladus - and what that will mean about the conditions in its interior. "It's one of these fun mysteries," she says. "It all goes back to this question: Could there be life...