Enceladus Mysteries Revealed by the Cassini Space Probe, Saturn's Moon Could Host Alien Life
On Feb. 17, 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was making the first-ever close pass over Saturn’s moon Enceladus as it worked through its detailed survey of the planet’s icy satellites. Exciting, to be sure, just for the thrill of exploration. But then Cassini’s magnetometer instrument noticed something odd.
Since NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft made their distant flybys of Enceladus about 20 years prior, scientists had anticipated the little moon would be an interesting place to visit with Cassini.
Enceladus is bright white—the most reflective object in the solar system, in fact—and it orbits in the middle of a faint ring of dust-sized ice particles known as Saturn’s E ring. Scientists speculated ice dust was being kicked off its surface somehow. But they presumed it would be, essentially, a dead, airless ball of ice.
What Cassini saw didn’t look like a frozen, airless body. Instead, it looked something like a comet that was actively emitting gas.
The magnetometer detected that Saturn’s magnetic field, which envelops Enceladus, was perturbed above the moon’s south pole in a way that didn’t make sense for an inactive world. Could it be that the moon was actively replenishing gases it was breathing into space?
Cassini space probe eventually found that Enceladus harbors a global ocean of salty water under its icy crust, possibly with hydrothermal vents on its seafloor. The trail of clues that began with a puzzling magnetometer reading led to an understanding that the moon—and perhaps many small, icy moons like it throughout the cosmos—could potentially have the ingredients needed for life.
Launched in 1997, the Cassini mission is currently in its final year of operations, performing weekly ring-grazing dives just past the outer edge of Saturn’s rings. In April, the spacecraft will begin its Grand Finale, plunging through the gap between the rings and the planet itself, leading up to a final plunge into Saturn on September 15.
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-nasa-ca…
Clips, images credit: ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA
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