Cassini Spacecraft Confirms Subsurface Ocean on Enceladus

(Before It's News)

Jets of icy particles bursting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus are shown in this Cassini image taken on November 2005. Credit: NASA/ESA/ASI.

Ever since the Cassini spacecraft first spied water vapor and ice spewing from fractures in Enceladus’ frozen surface in 2005, scientists have hypothesized that a large reservoir of water lies beneath that icy surface, possibly fueling the plumes. Now, gravity measurements gathered by Cassini have confirmed that this enticing moon of Saturn does in fact harbor a large subsurface ocean near its south pole.

“For the first time, we have used a geophysical method to determine the internal structure of Enceladus, and the data suggest that indeed there is a large, possibly regional ocean about 50 kilometers below the surface of the south pole,” says David Stevenson from Caltech, a coauthor on a paper on the finding, published in the current issue of the journal Science. “This then provides one possible story to explain why water is gushing out of these fractures we see at the south pole.”
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© nancy for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: Astrobiology, Cassini, Enceladus, plumes on Enceladus

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