Saturn's Moon Enceladus Has a Global Ocean

Posted on September 16, 2015

NASA researchers say Saturn's moon Enceladus has a global ocean located between its icy crust and rocky interior core. The solar region of the moon features active jets. Researchers used data from the Cassini mission to determine the moon has a global ocean.

The researchers found that the magnitude of Enceladus's wobble as it orbit Saturn can only be accounted for it its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its rocky interior. The data used includes seven years of images taken by Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. The jets of water vapor and icy particles coming from the moon's south pole is being fed by water from the global ocean. A hi-res version of the above image can be found here on nasa.gov.

Peter Thomas, a Cassini imaging team member at Cornell University and lead author of the research paper, says in a statement, "This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got it right."

Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute and co-author of the paper, says, "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. This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core."

Cassini is scheduled to make a close flyby of Enceladus on Oct. 28. It will fly within 30 miles (49 kilometers) of the surface of Enceladus.

A research paper on the Enceladus global ocean was published here in the journal, Icarus.

SPACE