NASA to announce finding "ocean worlds" in our solar system

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NASA reveals new data on 'ocean worlds' in our solar system
2 moons in our solar system hold watery oceans beneath their icy crusts

Looking for life in the universe? We may not need to look any further than Saturn.

On Thursday, NASA announced that the icy moon of Saturn, Enceladus, holds a "food source" for potential life.

Not only that, but it's believed that Jupiter's moon Europa — another icy world — is also spewing water vapour into space.

(This is an older version of the story. You can read about the new findings here.)

Though Earth is thought of as having the most abundant water in our neighbourhood, recent research has found that some moons could contain their own oceans, hidden beneath their icy crusts. Enceladus holds the most water in our solar system.

Enceladus is one such moon. The small, icy world in orbit around Saturn is believed to have an ocean of water beneath its icy crust.

Images from Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that's been in orbit around Saturn since 2004, have captured plumes of water vapour spewing into space. When the spacecraft flew through the plumes, it detected organic material, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

Another world with an ocean is one of Jupiter's moons, Europa. In September, NASA spotted plumes of water vapour erupting from the surface. It's believed that a warm, salty ocean exists beneath its icy surface.

NASA has planned a mission to the moon, called the Europa Clipper. It had proposed a landing mission, but it was cancelled in U.S. President Donald Trump's proposed budget.

While both moons are too far away to receive any direct warming from the sun, it's believed they are heated by the squeezing as they orbit their massive planets.

Both of these moons are two of the best candidates for life in our solar system.

A media briefing will be held at 2 p.m. ET Thursday in the James Webb Auditorium at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

NASA reveals new data on 'ocean worlds' in our solar system

:ehh:
 

I'mHigh

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:mjgrin:oh great! another "find" for nasa - moons that have water under ice huh?
They definitely do sensationalize the headlines but it's still pretty crazy the more we learn. They're finding planets that could sustain life in our own solar system and we're still only in the infant stages of space exploration. Just imagine what else is out there in this beautiful universe breh :sadcam:
 

Geek Nasty

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This isn't really news. They found Europa first, then Enceladus. Now, they think there can be liquid water under the ice on a lot of other moons (even Pluto).
 

Skooby

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They definitely do sensationalize the headlines but it's still pretty crazy the more we learn. They're finding planets that could sustain life in our own solar system and we're still only in the infant stages of space exploration. Just imagine what else is out there in this beautiful universe breh :sadcam:
Yeah, this has already been out there for a while now. It's still amazing though. I find it fascinating!
 

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The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.

The presence of ample hydrogen in the moon's ocean means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in the water. This chemical reaction, known as "methanogenesis" because it produces methane as a byproduct, is at the root of the tree of life on Earth, and could even have been critical to the origin of life on our planet.

Life as we know it requires three primary ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this finding, Cassini has shown that Enceladus – a small, icy moon a billion miles farther from the sun than Earth – has nearly all of these ingredients for habitability. Cassini has not yet shown phosphorus and sulfur are present in the ocean, but scientists suspect them to be, since the rocky core of Enceladus is thought to be chemically similar to meteorites that contain the two elements.

"Confirmation that the chemical energy for life exists within the ocean of a small moon of Saturn is an important milestone in our search for habitable worlds beyond Earth," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The Cassini spacecraft detected the hydrogen in the plume of gas and icy material spraying from Enceladus during its last, and deepest, dive through the plume on Oct. 28, 2015. Cassini also sampled the plume's composition during flybys earlier in the mission. From these observations scientists have determined that nearly 98 percent of the gas in the plume is water, about 1 percent is hydrogen and the rest is a mixture of other molecules including carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.

The measurement was made using Cassini's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) instrument, which sniffs gases to determine their composition. INMS was designed to sample the upper atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. After Cassini's surprising discovery of a towering plume of icy spray in 2005, emanating from hot cracks near the south pole, scientists turned its detectors toward the small moon.

Cassini wasn't designed to detect signs of life in the Enceladus plume – indeed, scientists didn't know the plume existed until after the spacecraft arrived at Saturn.

"Although we can't detect life, we've found that there's a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes," said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/...nsights-into-ocean-worlds-in-our-solar-system
 

southpawstyle

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I'd settle for a world made of cocaine
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