"Anything Living On Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Might..." Topic

… Belch Methane.

"Hang onto your EVA suits, space nerds. NASA's Saturn-exploring Cassini mission is back with another tantalizing hint that the planet's moon Enceladus might be able to support life. Not only does the icy moon have a global water ocean, a new study suggests that the ocean might even be producing a kind of food—though it's way too early to know if any microbial mouths are munching on it.

Which is not to say someone's running a sandwich shop down there. The food in question is the molecular hydrogen Cassini's instruments detected in a sample of Enceladus' plumes—the giant geysers of water that erupt through the icy crust on the moon's southern hemisphere. If the scientists' calculations are correct, the hydrogen is being produced by hydrothermal reactions, the same kind that sustain extremophiles in deep sea vents on Earth. So if there are any little Enceladians down there in the deep, they might be able to live off that subsurface chemistry too.

Cassini's target was always Saturn. Anything it gleaned from tiny, icy, little-studied Enceladus was just a bonus, and the mission's scientists didn't expect the moon to be nearly as interesting as it's turned out. "Planetary scientist have a rule for how planets work: Bigger bodies are warmer and more geologically active," says Christopher Glein, a geochemist and planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Enceladus completely flies in the face of that." Cassini's researchers discovered the moon's explosive plumes in 2005, and 10 years later found evidence of a massive subsurface ocean. So when Enceladus had another secret locked underneath its icy crust, nobody was surprised to be surprised…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Busy on the Message boards today too.

If there's no life there… should we give it some?

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand