Astrum Space - Are We Close to Finding Alien Life on Saturn's Moon Enceladus?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

In this compilation, we’re exploring Saturn's moon Enceladus. We’ll dig into recent discoveries on its icy surface, and in the subsurface ocean below. Could alien life be hiding in its depths?▀▀▀▀▀▀A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

For 50 years, Canadians have wondered what the names of IKEA furniture mean. Like Natopa, the guardrail for children's beds. Natopa means giving your favorite person room to grow. It means their safety and your piece of... No. In Swedish, Natapa means night monkey. IKEA, 50 years of Swedishness at home. Look, he's wearing little pajamas.

So cute. This is Enceladus. Saturn's sixth largest moon, a tiny world orbiting a giant planet. But don't let its seemingly unimpressive size fool you. When the Cassini space probe found huge cryovulcanic plumes erupting from its south pole, this little world brought the entire scientific community to a standstill. What was going on? Flying through these icy jets got us closer to an answer.

The probe discovered water, organic molecules, and hints of a hidden ocean filled with hydrothermal vents. But in 2017, Cassini ran out of fuel. As it dived into Saturn, it took with it our only means of probing in Saladus, leaving us with countless unanswered questions. Does it have a global ocean? What exactly is happening below the surface? And most importantly, could it be home to life?

A decade on, we've not yet returned to Enceladus, but the science hasn't stopped. The James Webb Space Telescope has turned its attention to the moon, and researchers are still mining the data that Cassini sent back. And luckily, we found more answers than you might think. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. me today as we return to this surprise in the Saturn system, explore the incredible chemical complexity hiding below its surface, and reveal how 10-year-old data is still shocking us, all in the search for life beyond Earth.

At just 500 kilometers across, Enceladus is a tiny world. It's similar in size to the state of Arizona. It orbits 238,000 kilometers from Saturn, where the Sun is a mere distant spark, and surface temperatures average a bone-chilling minus 201 degrees Celsius. All these factors make Enceladus an incredibly difficult target to track. It was finally discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1789, and to spot it required the largest telescope the world had ever seen. The instrument, built by Herschel and his sister Caroline, was so pioneering that its

half-ton mirror required more than a year of painstaking polishing. Yet, even through this Bermath scope, Enceladus looked like nothing more than an unremarkable icy rock. Herschel's telescope was so far ahead of his time that this remained our only perspective of the Saturnian satellite for nearly 200 years. It wasn't until the 1980s, when Voyager 1 and 2 performed their swift liebys, that our perspective shifted forever. The images sent back didn't show the featureless world we expected, but instead revealed regions

that were remarkably smooth and crater-free, suggesting the moon had been recently seismically active. Most curiously, Enceladus was found sitting directly in the densest part of Saturn's e-ring, leading scientists to suspect the moon was somehow feeding the ring with material. Was Enceladus alive? The mysteries raised by the Voyager flybys made Enceladus a high priority target for a follow-up and directly fuel the planning of the Cassini-Huygens mission. The Titan 4B rocket launched Cassini in 1997, and in late 2004, six years after its

double slingshot maneuver around Venus, it reached Saturn to carry on Voyager's legacy. It was a monumental effort that has since generated more than 4,000 scientific papers, but no discovery caused more hype than the events of early 2005. During its first flybys, Gisini's cameras caught sight of massive geysers, erupting from Enceladus into the vacuum of space. These vents were ejecting 250 kilograms of water and ice every second at speeds of over 1,000 kilometers per hour. This confirmed it.

Enceladus had an atmosphere and active geology. NASA immediately shifted the mission's course, ordering Cassini to perform a maverick maneuver, passing just 50 kilometers above the surface to taste. the plumes. What was worth such a risk you might ask? Well, NASA were looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. A major motivator of our exploration of space is the hope that we're not alone. To define life, NASA looks for a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. But what does that mean when we are searching on Enceladus? Well, there are four boxes we need to check. Liquid water, energy, chemicals, and time. First up, liquid water, the solvent of

life. The question here isn't whether Enceladus has it, that's abundantly clear, but rather we need to ask how much water is there, and where is it coming from? Cassini's initial photos and infrared images from 2006 showed significant heat at the South Pole. This Incredible photo shows the famous tiger stripes, long fissures in the icy crust, hinting at the activity below. And clearly some form of a liquid ocean exists here, potentially with hydrothermal activity that powers the huge ice plumes. For years, scientists believed this ocean was small and lens-shaped.

However, by meticulously tracking surface features over seven years, they noticed the moon, vibrates or wobbles, a lot more than would be possible with just a small polar ocean. This finding led to an astonishing realization. The core isn't rigidly connected to the surface. This episode is brought to you by Animals. How far would you go when someone threatens everyone you love? Who can you trust? From Academy Award winner Ben Affleck, Animal stars Affleck, Carrie Washington, Jillian Anderson and Stephen Young. When a Los Angeles mayoral candidate's son is kidnapped, he and his wife are pulled into a web of deception,

forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. Watch animals only on Netflix on October 9th. Rated R. We are now confident that the ocean covers the rocky core across its entire surface. In 2025, there was another breakthrough. Scientists from the University of Oxford, Southwest Research Institute and the Planetary Science Institute looked back through the Cassini observations of the North Pole from its winter in 2005

and summer in 2015. They found that not only was heat escaping at the South Pole, but also at the North Pole, it was 7 degrees warmer than they expected. This result tells us that Enceladus is generating a lot more internal heat. than we thought, and suggests the ocean may have been there for a while. But this far from the sun, it is bitterly cold. As I mentioned, the surface temperature of Enceladus is minus 201 degrees Celsius. There is no way water should be liquid.

So next on the list for scientists to check out was energy. Where was the heat coming from? If Enceladus generated heat by radioactive decay in its core like Earth does, The energy produced would only be 1% of what Cassini was witnessing. So in 2017, a team led by Gail Chaubley proposed a solution. Enceladus is tidily locked to Saturn, meaning the moon only ever shows one face to the planet. This distorts Enceladus, which creates heat inside the moon through internal friction and powers geological activity.

But it's not enough to just generate and radiate the heat. It needs to be physically transported from the core to the ocean above. How? Well, incredibly. It seems that water perfuses the silicate mineral core where it is heated, causing it to rise in focus blooms that pepper the seafloor around the South Pole. In 2022, a study led by Wan Yin Khan found further proof of these vents. Based on Cassini's data, they created models of Enceladus's icy surface to try and work out the salinity of the ocean. They found that it's just a little less salty than we find here on Earth, and that means

that there must be, or have been, water rock reactions, or in other words, vents at some point. Hydrothermal vents are credited by scientists as powering the origin of life on Earth, that these events may also exist on a small moon around a gas giant is an electrifying discovery because they give us the third requirement for life, chemicals. Cassini was equipped with a mass spectrometer, an instrument that can identify individual molecules by the mass of their ions. On its flybys, it detected hydrogen, believed to be a fuel source for early life, and complicated hydrocarbons containing oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. But scientists racing to process the huge volume and richness of data couldn't

keep up. Before they could get through it all, the Cassini mission came to an end, and on the 15th of September 2017, it was sent hurtling towards Saturn and was vaporized by the planet's atmosphere, in a self-destructive maneuver designed to protect potential habitable life on Enceladus and Titan from contamination by Earth-born microbes. Though Cassini's mission had been completed, hours had not. An analysis in 2018 had confirmed the existence of ring-shaped organic molecules and simple oxygen-containing molecules, indicating some limited chemistry was occurring. Another huge boost to the search for life came in 2022, when the last element crucial

to life was observed in the data, phosphorus. With its discovery, we now had all of the future. all six main elements believed to be necessary for life. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur, which scientists know by the acronym Chinops. For a while, this felt like the end of the story. But it turns out this particular book had a few more chapters to go. When scientists first saw the mass spec data from Cassini, they weren't confident in what they were looking at. It turns out that the spectra of the of a carefully prepared sample, analyzed while stationary in a lab, looks somewhat different

to the one obtained by crashing the detector into a detector at 64,000 kilometers per hour in space. A mass spectrum analyzer works by ionizing and breaking a molecule apart at high energy. How the molecule breaks apart matters. A molecule's fingerprint can look different depending on how it was fragmented, in the same way that a watermelon prepared with a knife looks different from one prepared with a blender. By understanding the typical pattern of how an object breaks under certain conditions, we can be more confident of what it used to be.

Improved analytical tools helped a team, led by Nosea Kavajar from the Institute of Space Systems in Stuttgart, do exactly that. After more than a decade of studying the plume flybys, Kowaj's team published their results last year, using samples that were collected when Kucini passed just 20 kilometers from the moon's surface. Unlike others, the probe collected, they were just minutes old, and therefore unchanged by ionizing radiation from the sun like other particles in the E-ring. These samples were a pristine example of what's in the oceans of Enceladus.

In the most extreme examples, they found molecules more closely related to life than ever before. Carbon dioxide, carbon-rich alkanes and alkenes, cyclic esters and ethers, ethyls, and other nitrogen and oxygen-bearing compounds. In other words, complex chemistry, potentially powered by hydrothermal vents. These molecules are the Lego blocks of chemistry. More functional groups allow for more complex reactions. In the lab, these can become so complex that they even demonstrate Darwinian evolution, and once you have evolution, there's just one last requirement. Time. What we need to know is how stable and frequent is this geothermal activity?

Would life have had enough time to emerge on Enceladus? Although Cassini was at Saturn for 13 years, that was, of course, too short a time to be conclusive. Enter the James Webb Space Telescope. A team led by Dr. Hieronimo Villian Nueva used 10 hours of the James Webb's time to check in on Enceladus, and what they saw was shocking. The moon had an even more enormous plume erupting from its south pole, expanding to 20 times the size of the moon itself. That is significantly larger than what Cassini saw.

These observations widened the known window of Enceladus's activity, and they solved another massive mystery. Where does Saturn's atmospheric water come from? The images show that Enceladus feeds a large torus of ice particles around Saturn, making it the only moon in the solar system that affects the atmospheric chemistry of its host planet. But these water ice particles also have another impact on the planet. As they travel through the Saturn system, they're stripped of electrons becoming ionized. This then creates an electrically charged plasma, which scientists have recently discovered

interacts with the planet's magnetic field. Plasma waves 504,000 kilometers long, that's 1,000 times the moon's diameter, known as the Alphen wings stream from the moon. The main ones go from Enceladus to the planet, but others are reflected back, creating an intriguing lattice of plasma around Saturn. We still don't fully understand them, but they're a surprising consequence of Enceladus's great geysers. But how long will this activity last?

Within the last year, decade-old data from the Cassini composite infrared spectrometer was compared to models of Enceladus's surface temperature. The team, comprising Georgina Miles and Carly Howitt, were able to show that the total thermal output from the surface is very well matched with the predicted heat generation in the core. This suggests the moon's current ocean epoch will be long lived, and that it is exactly what life needs to emerge. It is incredible how much more has been learned simply from re-analysing our own. old Cassini data with new techniques.

And it's not just the professionals who are making discoveries. In 2017, amateur astronomer Ted Strike looked back at old Voyager images of Enceladus and found a feature that could have changed the course of the original Cassini mission. A water plume. Can you spot it? If we had known about it when the mission was in planning, how different might the design of Cassini be? Well, whatever changes scientists and engineers might have made, they now have a chance to

be realized as new missions are being planned to continue the work of Kisini. The European Space Agency is racing forward with a mission set to launch in 2042, to arrive at Saturn in 253 with a potential landing on Enceladus in 2058. We already know Enceladus has all the conditions to kickstart life, so it's exciting to think, What will we be able to find when we look below the ice? Fortunately, we won't have to wait quite that long to get some answers on life on icy moons generally. Another ESA mission called Juce, or Jupiter Icey Moons Explorer, is already on its way and

expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2013 to study Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. Its mission purpose is to investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around Gash giants. Two other proposed missions will explore Saturn's moons in new ways. The Dragonfly mission to Titan will take advantage of the thick nitrogen atmosphere and use a drone for the first time on a natural satellite. Outside of the National Space Agencies, a privately funded mission called Breakthrough Enceladus is also planned, though currently this project appears to be dormant. But the mission I'm most excited about is the Enceladus Explorer, a project funded, by the German Aerospace Center that proposes to send a nuclear ice mall, yes, you heard

that correctly, to melt its way deep into the crust and expose untouched niches within the ice to search for life. If any of these even hint that proto-life processes are active on an object outside the usual habitable zone, we will have opened up a whole new realm of possible places life could take hold across the galaxy. Maybe life isn't rare after all. I'm always reminded of a fantastic line from Jeremy England. You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine a light on it for long enough,

it should not be so surprising that you get a plant. Perhaps scientists didn't see those plumes on the original voyage images because they simply weren't expecting to see them. But now that we know what we're looking for, there is no doubt more discoveries are on the way. There is also almost certainly yet more to find within Cassini's data even now, a decade after his mission ended in spectacular style, and I am as excited now as I was in 2004 when the probe first reached Saturn and its moons.

Out of all of the terrestrial planets other than Earth, it seems like Mars is the most likely place to harbor life. Going beyond Mars, we start to leave the Goldilocks zone or the theory of the Earth. theoretical zone in our solar system where life could survive on the surface. We are now heading towards the gas and ice giants, each with many unique and interest in moons. But can life be found this far out? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum, and together we'll go through the outer solar system and explore where scientists think the most likely places to find life could be.

The first planet after Mars is Jupiter. Jupiter itself is not at all hospitable to life as we know it. It barely has any form of water, it doesn't have a solid surface, and the winds and convection forces on the planet would drag down any microorganisms that try to form in the tops of the cloud layer. The deeper you go into Jupiter, the more the pressure and heat increases. The chances are very slim that life could exist here in these extremes. However, Jupiter has some moons where the conditions are much better.

The biggest of Jupiter's moons, called the Galilean moons, are big enough to have differentiated interiors. Small moons and asteroids tend to be just the same throughout, like a rock. However, bigger moons will often have layers and cores. The second of Jupiter's Galilean moons, Europa, is actually one of the most likely places to find life in the whole solar system, but not on its surface. The crust of Europa looks extremely unusual with these fault lines running all over. This is because the crust is actually made of water ice, and beneath this ice sheet is believed

to be a liquid water ocean that spans the entire moon. Evidence of this can be seen through the rotation of the crust, which is thought to have moved by up to 80 degrees, very unlikely to have happened. if the crust and core was solidly attached. Another piece of evidence is something that has only just been confirmed in the old Galileo spacecraft data. Galileo actually detected water plumes or geysers, shooting water far into space when it passed by the moon very closely. In 2016, the Hubble team suspected they might have imaged waterplume shooting 200 kilometers into space, and this rediscovered Galileo data has confirmed it.

NASA considers the prospect of life here so intriguing that there will be a dedicated Europa Clipper mission due to be launched in about four years' time. The Europa Clipper will orbit Europa, passing through the water plumes, sampling the water that is ejected. We are not expecting to find fish blasted into space by these geysers, but the water samples will tell us what the conditions are like under the crust. if there really is a possibility of life down there. Future robotic missions that aim to reach and traverse this ocean are still in the planning stages.

Interestingly, while Europa is the most likely place to harbor life around Jupiter, it is not the only moon that probably has an underground liquid ocean layer. Three of the four biggest moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, all could have life under their surfaces. Calisto may have a water or ice layer up to 300 kilometers thick. Ganymede has at least one water ocean layer, but could also have several, all separated by sheets of ice. Ganymede is probably the second most promising moon of Jupiter, as the bottom most water layer could be touching rock. Water to rock contact could be an important factor for life to exist as the rock provides minerals.

Ganymede is already the biggest moon in the solar system, but data also suggests that its underground ocean could also be the largest. Ganymede will also be getting its own mission, this time from ESA, or the European Space Agency, and it will arrive about the same time as the Europa Clipper. You may be asking, why do these liquid oceans form under the surface of these moons? Surely being so far from the Sun means these moons should be frozen solid? Well, along with tidal forces from Jupiter, a predominant thought at the moment is that the moons generate heat through something called Rossby waves, also known as planetary waves.

Rossby waves exist on Earth in its atmosphere and oceans, and are caused by the inertia generated by the rotation of the planet. They are slow-moving kinetic waves, but over a whole planet moon, they can store a huge amount of energy. This means the subsurface oceans on the moons could have a lot more energy than first thought, and may have currents and streams in them, just like in Earth's atmosphere and ocean. Why do scientists think life could exist in these oceans away from sunlight and the Goldilocks zone?

Well, let's remind ourselves of the factors needed for life. Water is present in these moons. Liquid water is essential because biochemical reactions can take place in water. Water is also an excellent solvent that easily dissolves and carries nutrients and other compounds in and out of cells. Life forms are made primarily of water. In fact, our human bodies are more than 60% water. Conditions in the moon's oceans would be cold, but not too cold as water is able to be in

a liquid state there. Being this deep under the surface means if it is also a protected environment from cosmic and solar radiation. However, there needs to be also essential chemicals and an energy source, which we can't guarantee exists at the bottom of these oceans. Let's compare these moons to life on Earth. Previously scientists believe that the Sun was the source of all energy for life on Earth. But as we explored the bottom of our own oceans, We found ecosystems that were completely independent from the sun. The organisms there relied on chemicals and energy released by hydrothermal vents. Bacteria there use chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis, to create energy for themselves.

These bacteria coat the vent, where amphipods and copepods graze on them directly. Above them in the food chain are snails, shrimps, crabs, fish, eels and a host more Here, the temperature is hot and the pressure is enormous, but if something similar to hydrothermal vents exists at the bottom of these moons oceans, and that life isn't unique to only Earth, this is as good a place as any to look for life. Beyond Jupiter, there are three more planets and their moons. Like Jupiter, the planets are very unlikely to contain life themselves. However, some of their moons also share the same characteristics with the moon's moon's

of Jupiter. Particular moons of note are Ria, the second largest moon of Saturn, Titania, the largest moon of Uranus, Oberon, the second largest moon of Uranus, and Triton, the largest moon of Neptune. The most exciting moon with these characteristics though is Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It has extremely active geysers which spew 250 kilograms of minerals and water into space per second at over 2,000 kilometers per hour. It ejects so much material that it has formed a ring around Saturn called the E-ring. Cassini, a spacecraft that used to orbit Saturn, was able to pass through these water plumes and detected carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, all key components of life.

There is definitely heat being generated under the icecraft, and, and it. as can be seen in this heat map. These are the tiger's stripes of Enceladus. The evidence of hydrothermal activity, water, and essential chemicals means that this tiny moon could be the most likely place in the whole solar system to find life. Sadly though, we are far from proving any of this. Enceladus does not have its own approved mission and it will be at least four years until we get orbiters launched that will go to Jupiter's moons, Actually, exploring the oceans is still a long way off. I can understand the problem though of getting a robot that deep into a moon, but it's

a little disheartening to think that we won't see it happen for at least I would guess 30 years. Beyond the planets and their moons, we have dwarf planets like Pluto, Eris and Sedna. If they follow the patterns we see in the larger moons, they too could have liquid water oceans under their surface, but again we are very far from being able to prove that too. There are just two more curious places to look for life in the solar system. The first is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. It is extremely cold and so is dismissed by some as uninhabitable.

However, it is unusual from any other moon in the solar system, in that it has a thick atmosphere with methane in it. In fact, the temperature is just right that liquid methane can form on the surface. The moon actually has a methane cycle similar to Earth's water cycle. There is evidence of seas, lakes and rivers of methane and ethane on the surface of Titan. Other factors essential to life also exist there, including chemicals and minerals on the surface, plus the moon orbits mostly within Saturn's magnetic field, which means it is protected from solar and cosmic radiation.

Theoretically, life forms could exist that replace water with liquid hydrocarbons. Such hypothetical creatures were taken H2 instead of O2, reacted with a stethylene instead of glucose, and produced methane instead of carbon dioxide. NASA had proposed the mission to investigate the Lakes of Titan in the form of a boat. But again, this was sadly turned down. Personally, I think the Lakes of Titan would be the most interesting to investigate, and the mission even seems a lot easier than burrowing several kilometers to reach a subsurface ocean. Maybe a space agency in the future will revisit this idea.

The last place to look in the solar system for life is on comets. A long-standing theory is that life has propagated through the galaxy on the backs of comets, although it is quite an outside possibility. The Filey lander that visited the comet's 67p Churumov Gerisimenko in 2004 was originally proposed to have life-detecting instrumentation on board. Sadly, this idea was laughed out of court, but as it turns out, the comet is rich with organic material and there are clumps that resemble viral particles. These findings are difficult to explain with prebiotic chemistry.

For now though, the concept of life on comets is heavily disputed, and so it will remain a remote possibility. Enceladus, perhaps one of the most intriguing objects in the entire solar system. And yet it is only the sixth largest moon of Saturn, and in natural light it looks very unassuming. However, there's a lot more to Enceladus than meets the eye. an active, icy world, with jets of water vapour pouring out from its southern hemisphere. Thanks to the remarkable Cassini mission, we have studied and observed Enceladus in exquisite

detail, and perhaps know more about it than some of the closer and bigger Jovian moons. However, although we've seen a lot from the outside, it's the inside of the moon that still holds so many mysteries. I'm Alex McColligan, and you're watching Astrum. Together, we will explore some of the most fascinating details of Enceladus, piecing together photos and data from a variety of missions to find out almost everything you could want to know about this special moon. So stick with me on this journey of discovery.

Let's first of all discuss where Enceladus fits into our solar system. Enceladus is currently Saturn's 14th closest moon. I say currently, as Saturn has some tiny moonlets here. hidden in its rings that may or may not be classified as moons in the future. It is the second-closest major moon, though, second only to Mimus. That means that its orbit takes it just outside of Saturn's major rings. Its orbit follows the planes of the rings very precisely, and it only takes 33 hours to orbit Saturn once.

Interestingly, it is in a 2-1 orbital resonance with Dione, Saturn's fourth-closest major moon. In other words, it orbits twice around Saturn in the time Dione orbits once. This orbital resonance is believed to prevent Enceladus's orbit from ever becoming perfectly circular, which causes Enceladus to undergo tidal deformation. This is significant, as these tidal forces heat up Enceladus's core. You see, as far as we can tell, Enceladus's surface is predominantly made of clean water, Certainly with little to no rocks, or much else there. Because Saturn is situated so far away from the sun, it means the outer layer of water on

Enceladus has frozen over. Enceladus is essentially a frozen ocean world, a giant ball of water ice. Because it is free from other materials on the surface, the moon is one of the whitest objects in the solar system, with a bond albedo of 0.81, which is pretty much as high as snow. As such, it is one of the coldest satellites of Saturn, with a noon temperature of minus 200 degrees Celsius, as the white colour of its surface reflects a large percentage of the sunlight reaching it back into space. However, about 30 to 40 kilometres down under the surface of Enceladus, pressures start

building and heat energy generated from the tidal deformation of its orbit has increased the temperature of the water ice to the point where the water at this depth can exist in a liquid form. It could well be that there is an entire mantle, or a global ocean of water that the ice crust is resting upon, very much like the magma mantle that our rocky crust on Earth rests upon. At the very least, scientists expect there to be a huge pocket of water under the moon's South Pole. How do we know this? Well, the most obvious indication are the huge plumes of water being ejected from the cracks in the crust, something referred to as water or cryo-volcanism. These jets are really active, consistently blasting around 250 kilograms of water into space every

second at speeds exceeding 2,000 kilometers per hour. This is powerful enough that most of the water vapor particles escape Enceladus' weak gravity, and they end up in orbit around Saturn, forming Saturn's E-ring. The ring around Saturn is very diffuse, and so isn't really visible unless it is backlit by the sun. From this angle, the light shining through the water particles make the ring appear exceptionally blue. In fact, this ring is considered the bluest object in the solar system, even more so than

Neptune, due to the ring's uniformity. The E-ring is Saturn's second outermost ring, and it is 2,000 kilometers wide. Its shape is also heavily influenced by the orbit of Enceladus. Enceladus' plumes create hindral shapes in the rings as more material erupts out of it. However, these sections of the ring tend to smooth off as Enceladus moves further away along its orbit. During the course of Cassini's mission, Cassini was able to pass through these plumes to detect the substances being ejected from them.

Cassini wasn't designed with this in mind. didn't know about the plumes until Cassini got there. However, Cassini was equipped with an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, designed to detect what the tiny dust grains in orbit around Saturn are made of, and it was able to use it for Enceladus' plumes too. As it wasn't specifically designed with this in mind, it might not have given us the full picture of what's in these particles, but while water was the predominant substance detected, Amino acids, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane were also found.

Amino acids are significant, as they are the building blocks of life and can be found around the thermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans. Does this mean Enceladus has thermal vents of its own? And if so, do they have ecosystems of life around them? While evidence for an underground ocean is abundant, scientists still aren't completely sure about Enceladus' internal structure. At some points in the past, scientists believed that Enceladus was water all the way through. However, data from Cassini suggests that Enceladus's mass is in fact greater than previously thought,

meaning it must have some amounts of iron or silicate material in its core. Scientists are starting to lean towards the theory that the internal structure is differentiated, meaning it's a celestial body with defined layers within it. An object of this size really doesn't have to be differentiated. In fact, it's so small at only about 500 kilometers across that it is right on the borderline of being in hydrostatic equilibrium, or in other words, being rounded by its own gravity. There are a number of objects out there of similar or smaller sizes that are not in hydrostatic equilibrium, like Neptune's Proteus.

In any case, assuming it does have a differentiated interior, this core is likely to be predominantly rocky. This is important, as thermal vents in Enceladus's water ocean would have to come from a rocky core. A rocky ocean floor would also provide nutrients and minerals essential for what we believe life would need to form and evolve. Thermal activity clearly does exist due to the way Enceladus has plumes in the first place, the amino acids detected in the plumes suggest a rocky core. As Cassini passed over Enceladus, it also mapped out the thermal emissions from the moon. It turned out that the jets line up with

what has come to be known as Enceladus's tiger stripes. These are large depressions, roughly 130 kilometers long, 2 kilometers wide, and 500 meters deep. It is believed that these are tectonic fractures in the moon's icy crust. What is really interesting about the surface features of Enceladus is that there are virtually no impact craters at all over the southern hemisphere, and not many anywhere else. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies?

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as while it does have a thin atmosphere made up from the ejected water from the plumes, this isn't nearly enough to burn up asteroids before they hit the surface. Some water from the plumes obviously settles again on the surface, which smooths it off over time. This is another reason why Enceladus is so round for such a small celestial body. In fact, apart from the tectonic fractures and few craters, Enceladus's topographical variation is really quite minimal. There are no mountain ranges to speak of, although there is what you might call a rough terrain around the South Pole if you zoom in far enough. This is perhaps the highest resolution image we have of its surface, and as you can see,

You see, it really does appear like a giant glacier. It's interesting to note that even in this small view, there are some smooth sections of ice, but also jagged regions. Over the North Pole, the clear difference is the number of craters present there. While there are tectonic fractures here too, there are no plumes on this side of the moon, so the surface here is clearly a lot older than around the South Pole, which is why it has more of a cratered surface. As Cassini flew through the plumes around the South Pole, it also took the opportunity

to image the surface closely around the tiger stripes. The surface here is pretty incredible, unlike anything you would have seen on Earth. It's like the surface has been folded, squashed, and shifted around, leaving these remarkable fracture lines and formations in the surface ice. The fact that Cassini was able to get so close to Enceladus is a feat in and of itself. It's fantastic that we can have such a close-up view of something so far away. Unfortunately though, since the Cassini mission has ended, we no longer have anything in orbit around Saturn that can study Enceladus further.

There have been plenty of mission proposals in the past, but all of them were cancelled before they came to fruition. What would be incredible is a probe that could either make its way into Enceladus' ocean somehow, or at the very least, search the plumes for signs of life. life. There is already a mission called Dragonfly going to the nearby moon of Titan, however, this won't have anything to do with Enceladus. So, although a couple of mission proposals are currently under review to go there, that means we are unfortunately still a couple of decades away at least,

which is a shame, because who knows what secrets lie in wait under that crust. So, there we have it, a look at the intriguing little moon. of Enceladus. Cassini is one of my favourite space missions of all time, thanks to the remarkable perspective it's given us of the Saturnian system. It spent a lot of time imaging Saturn's moons, including the mysterious moon of Enceladus. From the raw images, we can string together a time lapse from one of its first ever flybys of the icy moon.

Watch how Cassini systematically scan the surface at first, taking photos in various wavelengths of light, before eventually really zooming in on the surface. From this view, we can fully appreciate just how fractured Enceladus really is. As Cassini flew by, it looked back at this beautiful view of its crescent. As the images got sent back to Earth, scientists were able to piece them together to produce this beautiful mosaic. One more of Enceladus? Check the pin comment to watch my long-form video about it, and subscribe for my

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