Saturn's moon Enceladus, one of the brightest objects in the Solar System, may have pockets of liquid water lurking beneath its surface feeding great jets that spew from the satellite, hinting at the possibility of a habitable environment, researchers said Thursday. Observations from the Cassini spacecraft currently studying Saturn and its myriad moons shows Enceladus to be a geologist's dream, with an active plume spewing water and other material spaceward, as well as a hot spot of thermal activity at its south pole.
"This finding has substantially broadened the range of environments in the solar system that might support living organisms, and it doesn't get any more significant than that," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in an e-mail interview. "I'd say we've just hit the ball right out of park."
Porco led one of nine studies of Enceladus, all of which are detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science, based on Cassini's observations from three flybys past the moon - each closer than the last - in February, March and July of 2005.
Enceladus' active nature points toward subsurface water reservoirs beneath its icy exterior, much like that believed to churn just under the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, researchers said. But unlike Europa, which researchers believe harbors a vast ocean beneath kilometers of thick ice, Enceladus' water may be just below the surface.
"What's different here is that pockets of liquid water may no more than tens of meters below the surface," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Science, in a statement.
