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For years researchers have been debating whether Enceladus, a tiny moon floating just outside Saturn's rings, is home to a vast underground ocean. Is it wet – or not?
Now, new evidence is tipping the scales.
Not only does Enceladus likely have an ocean, that ocean is probably fizzy like a soft drink and could be friendly to microbial life.
The story begins in 2005 when NASA's Cassini probe flew past Enceladus for a close encounter.
“Geophysicists expected this little world to be a lump of ice, cold, dead, and uninteresting,” said Dennis Matson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Boy, were we surprised!”
Cassini found the little moon busily puffing plumes of water vapor, icy particles and organic compounds out through fissures (now known as “tiger stripes”) in its frozen carapace.
Mimas, a nearby moon about the same size, was as dead as researchers expected, but Enceladus was precociously active.
Many researchers viewed the icy jets as proof of a large subterranean body of water. Near-surface pockets of liquid water with temperatures near 32o F could explain the watery plumes. But there were problems with this theory. For one thing, where was the salt?
In initial flybys, Cassini's instruments detected carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and various hydrocarbons in the plume gasses. But there were none of the elements of salt that ocean water should contain.
In 2009 Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer located the missing salt – in a surprising place.
