Saturn s moon with water geysers should be the goal of NASA s next mission
NASA has recently been preparing a future space mission to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. However, there is a group of scientists who want to convince the agency to send another probe to the neighboring Titan Enceladus, on which we could search for life.
Enceladus is a small (about 500 km diameter), ice moon, which we got to know quite well thanks to the Cassini probe, which completed its mission at the end of 2017. During its mission, the probe found that Enceladus hides an ocean of liquid water under the ice surface. What's more, it turned out that steam geysers gushing tens of kilometers above the surface gushed from the moon's south pole. These geysers are the main reason scientists want to send the probe to Enceladus.
According to Amanda Hendrix, a planetologist at the Planetary Science Institute:
Enceladus is the only confirmed environment outside Earth that promotes the emergence of life. The logical next step is to look for signs of life in matter originating in the ocean of Enceladus, and in the case of this moon it is easy, because this matter spurts from the surface and reaches outer space.
According to the researchers, Enceladus should be the target of the next mission.
It's the New Frontiers program, which includes OSIRIS-REx missions to the asteroid, Juno to Jupiter and New Horizons to Pluto. The latest mission chosen under this program is Dragonfly, which will fly to Titan.
We know that there are many water worlds in the Solar System, and each of them is unique in its own way. Enceladus is different from Europe and from Titan.
Perhaps the most exciting feature that distinguishes Enceladus from other aquatic worlds are the geysers of water gushing from the inner ocean outside. They mean that scientists will not have to build a probe that will land on the surface of the moon and drill through the ice crust just to explore the hidden ocean.
This is only my opinion, but if we are looking for life in the Solar System and we have an ocean that comes out of the moon into space, making it easier for us to study, let's do it. There is no need to go on a more difficult path and build a lander - says Hendrix.
Although Enceladus's geysers make the ocean much more accessible to us, at the same time the interior of this globe is essentially isolated from the outside world. If life actually exists in the ocean, it must have evolved independently of life on Earth. For now, it is only a possibility, and to start dispelling doubts we must send a probe there.
Life in the ocean of Enceladus could have arisen completely independently of life on Earth. The ocean may also be completely uninhabited, but nevertheless the mission to it would provide us with groundbreaking discoveries.
Saturn's moon with water geysers should be the goal of NASA's next mission
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