We could have spotted the majestic icy plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus 25 years earlier than we did, if only we’d known to look.
The vast fountains of icy material erupting from Enceladus’s south pole enthralled planetary scientists when they were first spotted in images returned by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in 2005. Further observations suggest that the moon hosts a subsurface sea that could be one of the best places in the solar system to look for life.
Now a space image-processing enthusiast from Tennessee, in the US, believes he’s made a ‘pre-discovery’ of those plumes in archive image data from the Voyager 1 probe, which raced past the Saturn system in 1980.
Ted Stryk – an associate professor of philosophy and English at Roane State Community College who has recently worked with the NASA New Horizons team – processed Voyager 1 data that is publicly available from NASA’s online Planetary Data System to reveal a faint protrusion emanating from the frozen moon’s southern hemisphere.
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