NASA researchers spots global ocean on Saturn’s moon

Peter Thomas, who is a member of the imaging team at Cassini, said in a recent NASA blog post that it required several years of observations and thorough calculations involving different disciplines to come to the conclusion that there’s an ocean beneath the surface of Saturn’s third largest moon.

Following a 7-year-long research, NASA scientists reached a consensus that the violent jets of gas and vapors are produced by a liquid layer of water between the moon’s core and icy surface.

Scientists have long suspected that Enceladus, one of Saturn’s tiny moons, might be harboring a subsurface ocean.

(It was launched in 1997.) The researchers used Cassini to measure the wobble in Enceladus’ orbit of Saturn, something that “can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior”.

The mechanisms that might have prevented Enceladus’ ocean from freezing still remain a mystery. The researchers plugged their measurement of the wobble, also called a libration, into different models of Enceladus’ internal makeup, including ones in which the moon was frozen from the surface to the core.

If the surface and core of Enceladus were rigidly connected, there would be too much dead weight and that wobble would be less pronounced. One possibility proposed by Thomas’ team is that tidal forces created by Saturn’s gravity could be generating more heat within Enceladus than had been previously thought.

NASA has discovered that an ocean exists underneath Enceladus’ icy surface.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft had sent back visuals of Saturn’s Enceladus resembling a packed snowball.

Another significant aspect of this ocean’s existence is the potential for primitive life, which certainly could be possible in a cold, salty ocean environment.

“This is a major step beyond what we understood about this moon before, and it demonstrates the kind of deep-dive discoveries we can make with long-lived orbiter missions to other planets”, said study author Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at Space Science Institute in Colorado. “Cassini has been exemplary in this regard”.

The confirmation was made using research from Cassini a spacecraft that arrived at Saturn in 2004 and has spent the last decade studying the planet and its many moons. More information is needed before they can arrive at a concrete answer.

In the immediate future, scientists will get a close-up view of the moon when Cassini performs a flyby only 30 miles above the moon’s surface on October 28.