Enceladus Saturn Moon

Could alien life exist in huge ocean beneath Saturn’s moon Enceladus?

Another portrait of Earth, but this pale blue dot is a succinct moon in a summary of who we were on," Linda Spilker, Cassini spacecraft lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. A huge ocean has been found under the icy crust of Enceladus and all the signs suggest it could harbour alien life The hunt for extra-terrestrial life in our galaxy moved a step closer after Nasa said a huge ocean lies beneath the frozen crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Scientists said that the slight wobble of the moon could only be driven by a huge body of water sloshing under the surface as the satellite orbits around its planet. The ocean, is likely to cover the whole globe, according to data from Nasa’s Cassini mission, which is exploring Saturn’s system. As Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon, has always been a good candidate for life in the solar system. Water seen spraying from its surface was previously found to have the correct acidity for microbes to thrive and the same sodium chloride salt as oceans on Earth. Previous analysis of Cassini data suggested there was a lens-shaped body of water, or sea, underlying the moons near its south polar region. As can remove ethylene in an unodorox can lengthen shelf life of harvested crops But new gravity data collected during the spacecraft's several close passes over the south polar region show the sea must be far larger. Nasa originally thought the liquid water must be confined to the south pole.

The finding implies the fine spray of water vapour, icy particles and simple organic molecules.
Cassini has observed coming from fractures near the moon's south pole is being fed by this vast liquid water reservoir. "If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be," said Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California. "This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core," he said.
Enceladus is the sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn and was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. It has a circumference of 984 miles (1,584km) It is thought that the liquid water will have contact with the moon’s rocky core, which means that elements useful for life – such as sulphur and potassium – should be within the ocean. "There are definitely regions on Enceladus where the conditions are such that life could exist. You have liquid water, you have chemicals and you have heat. And that is enough for life. To my mind, this is the best place we can expect to find life elsewhere in the solar system," Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Leicester University told space lorn. New data suggests the ocean covers the whole of Enceladuswill be a vast. As could make human habitation possible Cassini scientists analyzed more than seven years' worth of images of Enceladus taken by the spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004.

They carefully mapped the positions of features on Enceladus -- mostly craters -- across hundreds of images, in order to measure changes in the moon's rotation with extreme precision. As a result, they found Enceladus has a tiny, but measurable wobble as it orbits Saturn.
Because the icy moon is not perfectly spherical -- and because it goes slightly faster and slower during different portions of its orbit around Saturn -- the giant planet subtly rocks Enceladus back and forth as it rotates. The team plugged their measurement of the wobble, called a libration, into different models for how Enceladus might be arranged on the inside, including ones in which the moon was frozen from surface to core. The mechanisms that might have prevented Enceladus' ocean from freezing remain a mystery. Thomas and his colleagues suggest a few ideas for future study that might help resolve the question, including the surprising possibility that tidal forces due to Saturn's gravity could be generating much more heat within Enceladus than previously thought. Cassini is scheduled to make a close flyby of Enceladus on Oct. 28, in the mission's deepest-ever dive through the moon's active plume of icy material. The spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's surface. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The research is presented in a paper published online this week in the journal Icarus. As new stunning images taken on Nasa Cassini spacecraft's from this mission to Saturn. Nasa's Cassini spacecraft, nearly 900 million miles from Earth, has turned its gaze away from Saturn and its entourage of moons to take a picture of its home planet. The image shows Earth as a very small, blue-tinged dot – paler and tinier than in other photos –overshadowed by the giant Saturn's rings in foreground. "We can't see individual continents or people with this.