Where is Enceladus located in space?”
First observed following a close flyby by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in July 2005, the jets were found to consist of both water vapor and icy particles, said Professor Nicholas Schneider of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The jets inspired speculation by planetary scientists that they were geysers — violent explosions of water out of a vent caused by expanding bubbles of water vapor emanating from an ocean beneath the icy crust of Enceladus. Scientists hypothesized that if such an ocean did exist, it might provide a suitable environment for primitive life forms, said Schneider, who led the study. “We wondered if there was an ocean underneath that crust and wondered if it is just spraying out through cracks like a geyser boiling away into space,” he said. To test the theory, Schneider and his colleagues performed experiments to find the relative content of sodium in the water vapor component of the jets. If the jets were geysers originating from an underground
It was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. Until the two Voyager spacecraft passed near it in the early 1980s, very little was known about this small moon besides the identification of water ice on its surface. The Voyagers showed that Enceladus is only 500 km in diameter, about a tenth the size of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and reflects almost 100% of the sunlight that strikes it. Voyager 1 found that Enceladus orbited in the densest part of Saturn’s diffuse E ring, indicating a possible association between the two, while Voyager 2 revealed that despite the moon’s small size, it had a wide range of terrains ranging from old, heavily cratered surfaces to young, tectonically deformed terrain, with some regions with surface ages as young as 100 million years old. The Cassini spacecraft of the mid- to late 2000s acquired additional data on Enceladus, answering a number of the mysteries opened by the Voyager spacecraft and starting a few new ones. Cassini performed several close fly
