Drink up. We’re about to get our best taste yet of the salty sea under Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Tomorrow, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is due to descend to within 49 kilometres of the surface – just a few kilometres higher than recent record-breaking skydives made by Alan Eustace and Felix Baumgartner on Earth. That will make it Cassini’s lowest pass ever through the plume of ice and vapour erupting from the moon.
During the mere tenths of a second the probe spends within the plume, an on-board detector will count the patter of ice particles hitting the spacecraft. That will show whether the plumes are tight sprays, or rise in sheets from fractures on the surface.
To read more, click here.