The flyby will be Cassini’s deepest-ever dive through the Enceladus plume, which is thought to come from the ocean below. Scientists have observed the moon’s geysers for decades, but they now believe they understand the seemingly limitless spring from which they spew.
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To that end, today NASA will send its Cassini space probe on a daring mission (official name: E-21) in which it will kamikaze directly into one of Enceladus’s active plumes (coming within only 30 miles of the moon’s surface) in order to gather information about the moon’s subterranean ocean environment.
Researchers hope the data will give them better understanding of hydrothermal activity taking place inside the 310-miles-in-diameter Enceladus, which might help answer the question about the likelihood of existence of primitive life forms on the ice-covered moon.
– Enceladus is an icy moon of Saturn. This spacecraft, unlike Cassini, could be created to land on Enceladus’ surface, near one of its “tiger stripes”.
NASA program scientist Curt Niebur considers Wednesday’s feat “a very big step in a new era of exploring ocean worlds in our solar system”.
Cassini has been orbiting Saturn at a distance of about 980 million miles from the Earth since 2004.
“Under the required conditions, hydrogen production would proceed efficiently, which could provide chemical energy for chemoautotrophic life”, the study authors wrote.
If Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer (CDA) detects molecular hydrogen in the moon’s plumes, hydrothermal activity is a given.
Check out the slideshow above for photos of Enceladus and its plumes taken throughout the years.
“It is going to be over in an instant”, Earl Maize, Cassini’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news briefing Monday.
In addition, the flyby will help solve the mystery of whether the plume is composed of column-like, individual jets, or sinuous, icy curtain eruptions, or a combination of both.
Saturn, a gaseous planet and the second-largest in the solar system, is about nine time the size of Earth and is the sixth farthest from the Sunday.
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Cassini’s closest passing of Enceladus happened back in 2008 when it travelled just 16 miles above the surface, but this skirting of the moon will be the lowest the spacecraft has passed through its plumes.
