Enceladus

Is There Microbial Life On Saturns Moon Enceladus?

March 28, 2012

Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring.

In a series of tantalizingly close flybys to the moon, named “Enceladus,” NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed watery jets erupting from what may be a vast underground sea. These jets, which spew through cracks in the moon’s icy shell, could lead back to a habitable zone that is uniquely accessible in all the solar system. “More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus’s south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place,” says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “Cassini has...

Saturn’s Moon Enceladus’s Dramatic Influence

September 22, 2011

By Michael Muracco

Water vapor and ice erupt from Saturn's moon Enceladus, the source of a newly discovered donut-shaped cloud around Saturn. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Saturn’s intriguing moon Enceladus pews out dramatic plumes of water vapor and ice. It possesses simple organic particles and may house liquid water beneath its surface. Its geyser-like jets create a gigantic halo of ice, dust and gas around Enceladus that helps feed Saturn’s E ring. Enceladus is the only moon in our solar system known to influence substantially the chemical composition of its parent planet. This June the European Space Agency using the Herschel Space Observatory found a huge donut-shaped cloud, or torus, of water vapor created by Enceladus encircling Saturn. The torus, which appears to be the...

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