On Wednesday, NASA’s Cassini probe will begin to conclude its time in the area of Saturn’s large, icy moons with three close encounters of Enceladus. Cassini’s latest pass took it within 1,142 miles of the moon’s surface.
Advertisement
Mission scientists hope the close up data and images will reveal the level of hydrothermal activity occurring in Enceladus’s subsurface ocean as well as ways that activity affects the ocean’s potential habitability for microbial life. The final two approaches of the spacecraft are going to take place towards the end of October and mid-December.
The American space agency said it expects to receive new images from the space probe within the next two days following the flybys, which will provide the first detailed view of the natural satellite’s north polar region. The summer sun is shining on Enceladus now, illuminating its northern latitudes and allowing scientists the chance to search for signs of ancient geological activity, according to a NASA statement.
Enceladus – a moon of the planet Saturn – has active water and ice geysers on its surface, discovered by the Cassini spacecraft in 2006.
Cassini probe’s data showed that the moon has a global ocean underneath its icy crust, geysers, and Earth-like hydrothermal activity. Scientists still try to learn more about the celestial body’s history and how it managed to be this way.
CGI rendition of Cassini’s flyby of Enceladus with Saturn in the background. In September, scientists became more fascinated with the moon when NASA said that it had a global ocean, contrary to the belief that it only had a regional sea. “It is therefore very tempting to imagine that life could exist in such a habitable realm, a billion miles from our home”.
Wednesday’s flyby is actually a prelude to the main event slated for October 28, when Cassini will pass just 30 miles above the moon’s southern polar region. Passing by at a distance of 3,106 miles (4,999 km) above the moon’s surface, Cassini will measure how heat flows from the interior to the surface.
An online toolkit for all three final Enceladus flybys is available at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/finalflybys. Coming up are a number of closest-ever brushes with the small moons that huddle near the planet’s rings.
Scientists plan to learn as much as possible during these flybys as they will be the last chances to see Enceladus up close for many years to come.
Advertisement
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.
