Nasa news saturn1/17/2024 Last year, a team of scientists at UArizona and Université Paris Sciences et Lettres in Paris calculated that if life could have emerged on Enceladus, there is a high likelihood that its presence could explain why the moon is burping up methane. As a result, spectacular plumes of water jet from cracks and crevices on Enceladus' icy surface into space. As the tiny moon orbits the ringed gas giant, it is being squeezed and tugged by Saturn's immense gravitational field, heating up its interior due to friction. The methane, along with other organic molecules that build the foundations of life, were detected when Cassini flew through giant water plumes erupting from the surface of Enceladus. Scientists were stunned when Cassini discovered that Enceladus' thick layer of ice hides a vast, warm saltwater ocean outgassing methane, a gas that typically originates from microbial life on Earth. Later, between 2005 to 2017, NASA's Cassini probe zipped around the Saturnian System and studied Saturn's complex rings and moons in unprecedented detail. When Enceladus was initially surveyed in 1980 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, it looked like a small, not overly exciting "snowball" in the sky. In a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, the researchers map out how a hypothetical space mission could provide definite answers. The mystery of whether microbial alien life might inhabit Enceladus, one of Saturn's 83 moons, could be solved by an orbiting space probe, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers. These plumes are much like geysers and expel a combination of water vapor, ice grains, salts, methane and other organic molecules. Artist's impression of the Cassini spacecraft flying through plumes erupting from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
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