14 DAY TRIAL // The Saturnine moon Enceladus – one of the most interesting objects in the solar system – got another picture taken recently, as a NASA orbiter flew relatively close to it. The spacecraft was located in excess of 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) away.
This new view shows a mixture of the old and the new on the surface of the ice-covered moon. To the upper right of the image, we can see terrain that has been damaged by recent cosmic impact events.
To the lower left, heavily-cratered terrain, most likely devastated millions of years ago, is also visible. The middle sections of the image show the two areas converging in on each other. Scientists believe that the new data could provide additional data into Enceladus' evolution.
According to SpaceRef, the image was collected at 5 degrees south latitude, 200 degrees west longitude, and covers an area around 504 kilometers (313 miles) across. Interestingly, the space probe captured this image in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The data were collected by the NASA Cassini orbiter, which has been analyzing Saturn, its ring system and its 60+ moons since achieving orbital insertion around the gas giant, on July 1, 2004.
To date, the orbiter carried out a large number of flybys above numerous Saturnine moons, especially Titan and Enceladus. While the former is interesting because it contains vast number of liquid hydrocarbon lakes, the later captured the attention of astronomers because it may house water.
Under Enceladus' miles-thick frozen surface, experts suspect the existence of a liquid ocean, that is protected from the harsh conditions of the space environment by the ice crust above. Within this ocean, which takes its heat from the moon's core, life may exist.
Conditions at that location are extremely similar to the ones experts discovered in sealed lakes, buried under 2 miles of ice in the Antarctic. In samples collected from these lakes, experts discovered microorganisms that had been separated from the outside world tens of millions of years ago.
On Enceladus, conditions may have once been favorable for the development of life. If this happened, and the moon then froze over, it's conceivable that some of the organisms that developed might have endured under the icy crust.
However, there is no way of establishing this for sure, until a space probe is sent to the moon, digs for miles and miles, and then somehow still manages to send data to Earth. In either case, this is unlikely to happen.
If a new mission is sent to the Saturnine system, then it will most likely focus on the moon Titan, which has more appeal to exobiologists and astronomers than Enceladus.
The Cassini orbiter is managed by experts at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is in turn managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the space agency's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.