USATODAY.com – Saturn moon spurts icy plume
Detected last year by the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn, the plume opens up the possibility that icy moons considered uninhabitable may actually harbor water, and life, says mission scientist Torrance Johnson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
“We cannot discount the possibility that Enceladus might be life’s distant outpost,” says planetary scientist Jeffrey Kargel of the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a commentary accompanying nine plume studies in today’s Science journal. The plume, which jets from the southern pole, indicates that an ocean is hidden under the moon’s frozen crust, study authors say.
Cassini spotted the geyser last year on close flybys of the 311-mile-wide moon. The $3.26 billion international mission arrived at Saturn in 2004.
Any life on frozen Enceladus would likely be primitive, Kargel says. The next Cassini flyby of the moon in 2008 will take it within 220 miles of the surface.