Strongest evidence yet indicates Enceladus hiding saltwater ocean

[Baclava]

Source: PHYSORG.com



Samples of icy spray shooting from Saturn's moon Enceladus collected during Cassini spacecraft flybys show the strongest evidence yet for the existence of a large-scale, subterranean saltwater ocean, says a new international study led by the University of Heidelberg and involving the University of Colorado Boulder.

The plumes shooting water vapor and tiny grains of ice into space were originally discovered emanating from Enceladus -- one of 19 known moons of Saturn -- by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005. The plumes were originating from the so-called "tiger stripe" surface fractures at the moon's south pole and apparently have created the material for the faint E Ring that traces the orbit of Enceladus around Saturn.

The study shows the ice grains found further out from Enceladus are relatively small and mostly ice-poor, closely matching the composition of the E Ring. Closer to the moon, however, the Cassini observations indicate that relatively large, salt-rich grains dominate.

"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than the salt water under Enceladus' icy surface," said Frank Postberg of the University of Germany, lead author of a study being published in Nature on June 23. Other co-authors include Jürgen Schmidt from the University of Potsdam, Jonathan Hillier from Open University headquartered in Milton Keynes, England, and Ralf Srama from the University of Stuttgart.


Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-strongest-evidence-icy-saturn-moon.html

---

Time to send out some new robots.

[calimary]

1. Dayum!

[Baclava]

10. That's what I said

I think they should call it a 'large-scale sub-Saturnian saltwater ocean'.

Earthlings are so homeworld-centered.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. liquid water might mean life

[Baclava]

5. That's what they say

It's all cracking open

"Tiger stripes"



We want more probes!

[Delphinus]

15. *Love*

that second picture!

[ImNotTed]

3. Saved by Salt

At least we won't be raping Enceladus when we fuck away all our fresh water here.

[Spike89]

4. Don't be so sure

Although water in space is valuable, it's main value is its components, primarily oxygen. It is worth cracking the water to get the hydrogen (possibly for fuel) and the oxygen (breathing and fuel) and the salts might (probably will) even be useful too.

[alfredo]

7. Salt for heat storage.

[leftyohiolib]

8. agreed. im thinking space station and launch deck

[TheWraith]

11. Sigh. Any story, someone will come along and use it as a platform to trash the human race. nt

[Baclava]

12. Ain't that the truth.

If you don't love humans, they won't let you board the breeder ships...or so I hear.

[leftyohiolib]

6. you mean mcrobots there's enough salt there for TWO large fries

[Vehl]

9. fascinating news !

There is life out there in the universe(s). Its a statistical inevitability

K&R

[ngant17]

13. Saturn is a long haul from Earth

1.2 billion kilometers, one way. The fastest spacecraft to date, NASA’s New Horizons, took 2 years and 4 months to reach the orbit of Saturn.

I don't think manned exploration to those distances in outer space will ever be possible in my lifetime. More robots, for sure. The vacuum of space, temperature extremes and various types of radiation are extremely inhospitable to living organisms. And to say nothing of micrometeorites traveling at you at 60 miles per sec., far more denser than armor-piercing bullets (which typically travel a fraction of that, perhaps 1400 mph here on Earth). Outer space is a never-ending war zone that can't completely be defended against.

[Peace Patriot]

14. Outer space dangerous, but you think earth's ocean wasn't (isn't)?

I've just been re-reading the Patrick O'Brian sea saga (the Aubrey-Maturin novels), a very realistic portrayal of sailoring in the early 18th century, in which human beings had begun to routinely take 2-3 year commercial voyages in a very dangerous environment, indeed--the sea. O'Brian stresses this extreme danger, true in the era of the tall ships and still true today, though less so, today, I suspect, due to scientific/engineering improvements. But, to draw an analogy to outer space, we are barely out of the canoe era--i.e., very early sea travel generally hugging the shoreline--that is, we've only gotten as far as the moon, using technology that seems mindbogglingly primitive today (no computer chips). As to outer space, we are like the first venturers onto the sea.

Although it has become evident that the Pacific islanders, the Phoenicians, the Vikings and others ventured far--using brilliantly engineered but low tech (by our standards) ships, or, in the case of the Phoenicians, highly sophisticated maps--they did so at great risk, and most people were terrified of the sea for good reason--including giant, unpredictable storms, giant waves, whirlpools, icebergs, getting lost, starving to death, dying of exposure to cold or heat, falling overboard, hitting reefs, approaching strange and hostile shores, and more. My point is that this did not stop the human race from exploring its own "vasty deep" right here on earth. Adventure seems to be in our DNA. To say that outer space is dangerous is to say nothing, really. Of course it's dangerous. Some of us like dangerous. And we characteristically engineer to overcome dangers as well as distance.

I think it is pretty much inevitable that human beings will inhabit the solar system, if, for no other reason than that we are greatly overpopulating earth and are running out of room and resources. The only "ifs," I think, are, nuclear war in this century which, according to Carl Sagan, will snuff out all life on earth very quickly--in a matter of months--due to dust clouds killing vegetation and of course nuclear radiation. He says this will happen even with a limited nuclear exchange, and earth is still bristling with nuclear weapons. I do think this will likely change over the century--that is, abandonment of nuclear weapons (as well as nuclear energy), short of complete catastrophe. The other "if" is global warming--a very, complex, but very lethal set of impacts from our own industrialization that may kill the planet. According to the World Wildlife Fund, we have less than 50 years, at current levels of consumption, pollution and deforestation--less than 50 years to the death of the planet.

So we may truncate the human enterprise altogether by failing to maintain a livable habitat (earth) before we develop the technology for relatively safe (some "sailors" survive) space travel and colonization. Danger has never stopped us.

Our main problem is that our technological ability outruns our wisdom. And we have been unable to devise a governmental system that combines both freedom (essential to innovation) and wisdom (essential to understanding all impacts). We did have one in the '60s and '70s, in the U.S.--a real democracy in which 80% of the people wanted strong regulation and protection of the environment, and were able to push government to do the will of the people. Innovation is great. Killing the planet is not. But we lost that democracy beginning with Reagan, and I don't see much hope of getting it back. Europe and Latin America, on the other hand, have strong environmental trends and fairly responsive governments (indeed, a democracy revolution in Latin America, often led by the Indigenous who reverence Mother Earth). I have not given up hope that we will restore earth's biosphere, and, if we do, the natural extrapolation is that we will use that knowledge (how to restore biological systems) for space travel and colonization, and especially for terraforming other planets (creating earth-like environments elsewhere).

[Baclava]

16. Manned spaceflight is dead - robots are much cheaper.

And it ain't so bad - - - flood the outer planets' moons with probes. That's where the action is.

Make it science again... face it, humans are just too damn expensive to put into space - and we can't even get out of low earth orbit with the stuff we have.

Get crackin'... if we're gonna spread our seed to the stars, we need propulsion



NASA to test plasma engine on space station

NASA to Test VF-200 VASIMR Plasma Rocket at the ISS

The VASIMR has already been tested extensively in a vacuum chamber at a ground facility. The VF-200 flight test article would use 200kW of power to fire its engine. The VASIMR works by superheating hydrogen gas into a plasma and injecting it out a magnetic nozzle. It is more efficient than a regular chemical rocket as it can fire continuously, over hours or even days and weeks, slowly building up the acceleration of a space craft to tremendous speeds over interplanetary distances.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20110311/tc_ac/8036414_nasa_to_test_vf200_vasimr_plasma_rocket_at_the_iss

[sofa king]

17. Oh no. Saturn is right next door.

If I remember correctly, the energy required to reach the moon is 90% of the energy required to reach Saturn. For comparison, the Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the moon was capable of sending a 1 kilogram package to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (according to something I vaguely recall by Carl Sagan decades ago).

Exploration vehicles assembled and launched from lunar orbit would require only a fraction of that energy to get from the Moon to Saturn, because virtually all of the work for leaving Earth's gravity well has already been done.

With the perfection of the ion rocket, as demonstrated by the ultra-cool http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/">Dawn Mission, (which many of you will now not be able to resist following daily), and long-term survival in space, it's even possible to lop off a module of the ISS, or take the whole thing, and slow-roll it to Saturn in ten-or-so years.

So human exploration of the outer planets is probably already about as easy as it's going to get for a long time.

Having said that, one thing which needs to happen long before that is some sort of way to ensure that absolutely no Earth-based life could potentially infect Enceladus before it can be explored. That place will require ultrahygenic robotic vehicles, and there will be no need for humans to even dirty its orbit when water and volatiles can be more easily acquired from comets and small asteroids, anyway.

(If you want a great potential example of how to screw such an exploration up, just watch as the Russians drill into Lake Vostok. They weren't real enthusiastic about decontaminating their drill bit, and continue to use the same dirty bore-hole they started with.)

Of course, the possibility that some early earth-based bacteria was already blown all the way out to Enceladus in a massive collision probably also exists, and we may find the place to be a giant sludge of our own ancestors.

[Chan790]

18. sludge of our ancestors?

Given even 2,000,000,000 years of completely-parallel co-evolution without any crossover or interaction between the two biospheres, I doubt anything we find would be even remotely similar to us (or to any of our ancestors) even if we do share a common ancestor.

Hell, we could discover they're animal-like photosynthesizers...or that they still reproduce asexually by mitosis...or that their respiratory output is methane.