Enceladus

Feb 18 2023

How life could be detected on Enceladus

The mystery of whether microbial alien life exists on Enceladus could be solved by a spacecraft orbiting Saturn's moon, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers. In a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, the researchers show how a hypothetical space mission could provide definitive answers. When Enceladus was first surveyed by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1980, it looked like a small, unexciting "snowball" in the sky. Later, between 2005 and 2017, NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbited the Saturn system, examining Saturn's complex rings and moons in unprecedented detail. Scientists were stunned when Cassini…

Enceladus

Sep 24 2022

Conditions for life in the Enceladus ocean increasingly certain

Saturn's moon plays a special role in my books. Therefore, I am always very happy when there is news about possible life in the moon's ice ocean. Like the following. A team of scientists has apparently discovered new evidence for an important building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Their model calculations suggest that Enceladus' ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life. "Enceladus is one of the most important targets in humanity's search for life in our solar system," said Dr. Christopher Glein of Southwest Research Institute, a…

Jupiter’s moon Europa could have water near surface

Enceladus

Apr 19 2022

Jupiter’s moon Europa could have water near surface

Jupiter's moon Europa, like Saturn's moon Enceladus, is an important target for the search for extraterrestrial life. That a liquid, salty ocean exists beneath its ice crust seems clear since the visits of Voyager and Galileo. But to explore this body of water, visitors must first drill through at least 20 to 30 kilometers of ice. Or maybe not? At least that's what a new study based on data from the Greenland Ice Sheet, published in Nature Communications, suggests. The results could provide insights into the geophysical processes that led to the formation of Jupiter's moon. Riley Culberg, a…

Even on smaller icy moons, the chances for life on the ocean floor are good

Enceladus

Mar 3 2022

Even on smaller icy moons, the chances for life on the ocean floor are good

The fact that astrobiologists have such high hopes for icy moons like Enceladus or Europa is not only due to the oceans they have been able to detect under their ice crusts, but also to the fact that they are geologically active worlds. The culprits are the giant parent planets Saturn and Jupiter, respectively, which really knead the moons with their gravitational force. This creates heat, which keeps the water in their hidden oceans liquid and relatively warm. The water in turn dissolves from the underlying rock layers what potential life could need. Energy is also released in the…

Mimas has an ocean under the surface too

Enceladus

Jan 20 2022

Mimas has an ocean under the surface too

Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan have one, as do Jupiter's moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa and the dwarf planet Pluto: a liquid ocean beneath their icy surfaces. Perhaps the same is true of Saturn's moon Mimas, as a Southwest Research Institute scientist suspects. Dr. Alyssa Rhoden, a specialist in the geophysics of icy satellites, actually set out to prove that Saturn's tiny, innermost moon is a frozen, inert satellite. Instead, she found evidence that the moon also has a liquid inner ocean. One of the most fundamental discoveries of the past 25 years in planetary science is that worlds…

Enceladus

Jul 18 2021

Enceladus: Be careful when walking on ice

Anyone landing on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, for example to explore the ocean at its depth, had better be careful: Ice quakes could be part of everyday life on the surface of the 500-kilometer-diameter moon. Researchers are drawing attention to this in a new study. The culprit is the massive tidal forces caused by Saturn and the planet's other, larger moons - much like the moon on Earth. These tidal movements, on the plus side, warm its interior so that life could possibly arise there. But they also cause the surface to crack, sometimes pushing large geysers of water…

Enceladus

Jul 10 2021

New signs of life from Enceladus

In the geysers at Enceladus' south pole, the hypothetical probe "Enceladus Life Finder" detects clear signs of life in my book "The Enceladus Mission" - whereupon a crewed spacecraft, the ILSE, is sent to Saturn's moon. But it all really starts with Cassini, the NASA-ESA mission that found a relatively high concentration of certain molecules associated with hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans, specifically hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, just there. The amount of methane found in the vapor plumes was particularly unexpected. "We wanted to know: Could Earth-like microbes that 'eat' the hydrogen and produce methane…

Enceladus

Dec 22 2020

Richly covered menu in the Enceladus ocean

Life needs energy for its existence. The more extensive and diverse the supplies of a potential ecosystem are, the more stable the communities that develop there can be. For Saturn's moon Enceladus, a new study now indicates that a diverse metabolic menu could support a potentially diverse microbial community in the liquid-water ocean beneath the moon's icy skin. Using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have modeled the chemical processes in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Before its deorbit in September 2017, Cassini studied the cloud of ice grains and water…