Particles spewed from Saturn’s moon Enceladus are sandblasting neighboring moons, leaving them sparklingly bright

2008-03-25: Life on Enceladus?

Could microbial life exist inside Enceladus, where no sunlight reaches, photosynthesis is impossible and no oxygen is available? The answer appears to be, yes, it could be possible.

I invite you to imagine the day when we might journey to the saturnian system and visit the Enceladus interplanetary geiser park, just because we can.

2008-10-24: Cassini pictures

Saturn’s tiny, icy moon Enceladus has recently been visited by NASA’s Cassini orbiter on several very close approaches – once coming within a mere 25 kilometers of the surface. Scientists are learning a great deal about this curious little moon. Only 500 kilometers wide, it is very active, emitting internal heat, churning its surface, and – through cryovolcanism – ejecting masses of microscopic ice particles into Saturnian orbit. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for over 4 years now, and has provided some amazing views of tiny Enceladus, some collected here.

2022-11-11: Phosphorus predicted

Team members performed thermodynamic and kinetic modeling that simulates the geochemistry of phosphorus based on insights from Cassini about the ocean-seafloor system on Enceladus. They developed the most detailed geochemical model to date of how seafloor minerals dissolve into Enceladus’s ocean and predicted that phosphate minerals would be unusually soluble there.

“The underlying geochemistry has an elegant simplicity that makes the presence of dissolved phosphorus inevitable, reaching levels close to or even higher than those in modern Earth seawater. What this means for astrobiology is that we can be more confident than before that the ocean of Enceladus is habitable.”