09
11
2009
Plumes on Saturn’s moon may be a sign of life
Posted by: Chris Williamson in Colonizing Space
Saturn’s geyser-spewing moon, Enceladus — visited by the international Cassini spacecraft on its closest flyby this week— presents planetary scientists with a geophysical locked-room mystery.
Whodunit? Or rather Whatdunit? Or Whatizit?
How does something buried inside an ice ball only 311 miles wide, provide the pop to propel a plume 600 miles out of the moon’s south pole? “The biggest puzzle with Enceladus is where is the heat source,” says Cassini scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. “This tiny moon ’should’ be frozen over like the others orbiting Saturn.” more>>>
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