A Basic Recipe for Life on Enceladus

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” Dennis Matson, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in the statement. “We have quite a recipe for life on our hands, but we have yet to find the final ingredient, liquid water.”

______________________________________________________________ Discovered in 1789 by William Herschel as one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus is considered as Saturn’s sixth largest moon with very little known about it. At least until NASA’s two 1977 Voyagers, Voyager I and Voyager II–a pair of unmanned scientific probes which were officially designated to study Jupiter and Saturn because of a favorable planetary alignment of the late 70s.

When Cassini was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, it traveled 2.2 billion miles before it entered orbit in 2004 around Saturn. Today, Cassini is part of a 3.2 billion dollar Cassini-Huygens mission which is a combination mission—NASA, European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency.

NASA’s spacecraft Cassini has been able to acquire a lot more information since then which added to the previous Voyager 1’s data—such as there may be a possible connections between the densest part of the E ring of Saturn and its moon, Enceladus—and Voyager’s II date—that the moon had a wide range of terrains ranging from very old to some as young as 100 million years old. The reason that Saturn’s moons are of interest is because the largest moon, Titan, resembles Earth in its earlier days and because in 2005, a significant atmosphere was found.

What is surprising is the latest Cassini findings show that Enceladus has chemical components which resemble that in a comet. This find has caused lots of questions in the scientific community regarding Saturn’s formation. But recently some exciting news has come about Enceladus from the NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has revealed a water vapor concentration, with carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and organ material-all 20 times denser than was ever thought to be, in addition to temperatures being higher than previously.

When Cassini measured temperatures near Enceladus’s south pole, it was minus -135 degrees F., which is 17 degrees warmer than previously taken. “The surprisingly high temperatures make it more likely that there’s liquid water not far below the surface,” John Spencer, another project scientist, said in the statement, e- mailed yesterday.”These spectacular new data will really help us understand what powers the geysers.”