See a New Close-Up of Saturn's Icy Moon

The spacecraft will zoom within 30 miles (50 kilometers) of the pole, providing the best sampling yet of its underground ocean. It is hoped the flyby will have brought the probe close enough to detect large organic molecules in the spray, which may be an indicator that life exists on the moon.

Researchers estimated before the flyby that the spacecraft would whiz through the plume at about 19,000 miles per hour, and that this pass would last only tens of seconds. Scientists are preparing to use the spacecraft's data to answer questions if Enceladus is friendly to life and to what extent.

This flyby is not the nearest approach of Cassini to the surface, but it was the deepest dive through the plume. And, tidal heating on Enceladus may be triggered by the moon's interaction with other moons' and Saturn's gravitational fields, scientists suggest.

The latest mission had Cassini dive into plume located at Enceladus' south polar region, which experts at the American space agency believe could hold evidence to prove the existence of a subterranean ocean deep within the moon's icy crust. Scientists are now analyzing the data to see what Cassini found. The view shows the glowing geysers captured by Cassini's onboard cameras. Heavier chemicals in the plume would not float up as high as other chemicals.

"Cassini truly has been a discovery machine for more than a decade", Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a teleconference earlier this week.

Around 100 geysers erupting from surface features known as "tiger stripes" were identified as its source.

And, as NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay said, it's as if someone had hung a sign on Enceladus reading, "Free Samples". During the encounter, Cassini furiously snapped photos of the enigmatic little moon. This would make Enceladus even more likely to support alien microbes, since they're what would keep the water warm and create mineral nutrients. It's also worth mentioning that the folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to do some fancy image processing to minimize the smearing effect caused by the spacecraft's fast motion.

'We will be sensing the gases and looking at the particles that make up these plumes'.

In comparison to Jupiter's moon Europa, which also contains ocean, Enceladus is a tiny moon, just about 300 miles across.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.

As part of this mission of collecting data from this moon, the spacecraft measured the level of molecular hydrogen that was found in the plume of the moon. Unlike NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, Cassini does not possess the instruments to search for living things.

 

Close-up pictures of Enceladus should be ready much sooner.