NASA: Potentially Hospitable Enceladus

NASA:  Potentially Hospitable Enceladus

Seen from outside, Enceladus appears to be like most of its sibling moons: cold, icy and inhospitable. But under that forbidding exterior may exist the very conditions needed for life.

Over the course of the Cassini mission, observations have shown that Enceladus (313 miles or 504 kilometers across) not only has watery jets sending icy grains into space; under its icy crust it also has a global ocean, and may have hydrothermal activity as well.  Since scientists believe liquid water is a key ingredient for life, the implications for future missions searching for life elsewhere in our solar system could be significant.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Enceladus.  North on Enceladus is up and rotated 6 degrees to the right. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2016.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 81,000 miles (130,000 kilometers) from Enceladus. Image scale is 2,566 feet (782 meters) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.  The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute


Enceladus is one of the great sci fi dreams in the solar system since the seas beneath the surface may harbor just about anything.  As far as we know, life doesn't happen unless there's liquid water to support it and Enceladus has plenty.

Perhaps we can expect more than some minor microbes which are only suitable for Michael Crichton novels about plague and despair.  Perhaps there's advanced life under there but it would be radically different from ours when all of its existence is marine.


Probably it takes at least ten years for NASA to build the robos to go out to this planet or that moon and then there's the flight time to get there.  Their scientists have probably been trying to put together some type of marine robo but probably there would be some primary robo on the surface which dispatches drones of some form to go down to the liquid area to search it.

To reach Enceladus, it seems our lander must successfully get to the surface and establish some type of base from which there can be communications with Earth.  It doesn't seem there would be any way to continue communications with any robo which gets through the crust to the underground seas.  It would have to return to the base station to upload information to the transmitter or some type of mechanism like that.


There is a novel aspect to liquid water on a moon which seems intuitively would be impossibly cold since the water can't be much less than 32F unless there's an extremely high level of salt in it.  There are other ways to get water below 32F but salt is the most common on Earth.  Even so, that temperature is far higher than we should likely expect on a moon of Saturn and yet then we find Enceladus.


The design sessions at NASA in which they argue about whatever kit should be aboard an Enceladus Explorer must be a wild privilege.  Maybe they have favorite systems they want sent there since maybe his machine can detect this or her machine can detect that.  On Mars they had a reasonably good idea of what they would try to detect since they could see it.  On Enceladus they only know it's wet.  Maybe we expect it to be dark in those underground seas but lots of creatures on Earth are capable of making light.  For all we know it will look like some space alien Broadway underneath there.


For many, such things are not interesting, they're a waste of money, etc but hopefully that thinking can't stop the explorers who just have to know what's out there.