* Astronomy

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RE: Enceladus

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Icy Saturn moon burps up heat and ice

The icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus appears to occasionally belch up blobs of warm ice, findings that help explain the mysterious heat seen there, scientists now suggest.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft "appears to have caught Enceladus in the middle of a burp," said researcher Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Blobs of warm ice that periodically rise to the surface and churn the icy crust on Saturn's moon Enceladus explain the quirky heat behaviour and intriguing surface of the moon's south polar region, according to a new paper using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"Cassini appears to have caught Enceladus in the middle of a burp. These tumultuous periods are rare and Cassini happens to have been watching the moon during one of these special epochs" - Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz and a co-author of the new paper in Nature Geoscience.

The south polar region captivates scientists because it hosts the fissures known as "tiger stripes" that spray water vapour and other particles out from the moon. While the latest paper, released on Jan. 10, doesn't link the churning and resurfacing directly to the formation of fissures and jets, it does fill in some of the blanks in the region's history.

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Enceladus's Mysterious Behaviour May Be Transient

Enceladus, Saturn's sixth-largest moon, is an icy bundle of contradictions. It is tiny in planetary terms - the entire moon could fit snugly inside the borders of New Mexico - and yet it hosts a level of geologic activity usually reserved for the big dogs of the solar system.
From Enceladus's south pole emanate geyser like jets, watery plumes that spew outward from a region carved up by unusually warm gashes known as "tiger stripes". But by all rights, the moon is losing much more energy through this geologically active region than it has to spare. This disparity is "the big problem of Enceladus that sticks out like a sore thumb," says planetary scientist Craig O'Neill of Macquarie University in Australia.
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Geysers not fed by misty water vapour after all.

As much as 50% of the plume shooting out of geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus could be ice, a researcher revealed yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
Previously, scientists had thought that only 1020% of the plume was made up of ice, with the rest being water vapour.
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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image of the plumes of Enceladus was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on the 9th December, 2009 when it was approximately 622,280 kilometres away.
The image was taken using the IR2 and CL2 filters.

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Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image of Enceladus was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on the 9th December, 2009 when it was approximately 652,246 kilometres away.
The image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

Blobrana · L

This image of the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus was captured on the 21st November, 2009, by the Cassini spacecraft.
The image shows plumes of water vapour and other particles escaping from fissures on the surface.

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Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Credit NASA

This image of Enceladus was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on the 21th November, 2009, when it was approximately 9,179 kilometres away.
The image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.

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Credit NASA

This image of Enceladus was taken by the Cassini spaceprobe on the 20th November, 2009, when it was approximately 303,210 kilometres away.
The image was taken using the CL1 and CL2 filters.