NASA Cassini Mission: Enceladus Has a Surprise Up Its Sleeve!

The imaging equipment on the Cassini Saturn Mission Spacecraft just cannot seem to take a bad picture, every one is pretty damn amazing. The continual procession of moons and  minor moons, the rings and their different profiles, interesting atmospheric effects, storms, aurora…all there for the photographic taking.

The image above is one of the latest ‘Wish you were here’ snaps as taken by the school bus sized Nasa Cassini spacecraft, and it has as its centre piece one of the most fascinating moons in the entire solar system.

This moon complete with the majestic rings in the background is Enceladus, and it looks from this image like a rocky place, yes pretty common as moons go you’ll probably agree. But this satellite of Saturn is a world of ice, scarred, pummeled, and cratered by comet and meteor impacts over the eons. Enceladus is a small place, at only around the size of England, but this moon is no ordinary solar system body.

Enceladus has a surprise up its sleeve, it is one of the few places in the solar system where alien life could have made a home. Other places in this exclusive club include Saturn’s moon Titan, and Jupiter’s moon Europa.

If you look at the Cassini image at top you’ll see a fuzzy area below Enceladus, no this is not some sort of photographic anomaly, these are the geysers of Enceladus.

Yes you read that right…from its south pole this moon shoots out liquid water from four large parallel chasms on its surface called “Tiger stripes”.

On immediate impact with the frigid cold of space it freezes into fine ice crystals. Get a better look at those amazing geysers below!

Something interesting is going on here and the south pole of Enceladus is a lot warmer than it really should be as you can see from the eruption in the photograph (bottom of image center).

Scientists think that under that ice in the south pole could be a liquid salty ocean, and you know what that could signal?

Yes, life! And where there is water you will usually find life.

Also getting in on the picture in the Cassini image at top is the small 70 mile wide moon Epimetheus looking like it’s been stuck onto the north eastern edge of Enceladus. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was  some 109,000 miles from Enceladus as it took this picture.

Article by:

John Brady of Astronomy Central