Russian billionaire seeks to fund private mission to Saturn moon in search of extra-terrestrial life

Speaking at a Seattle conference, 'A New Space Age', Milner said his science team believes there are three potential locations for extra-terrestrial lifeforms in our solar system: under the surface of Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and "the most promising candidate," Enceladus.

Located 1.27 billion miles away from Earth, Enceladus has a surface temperature below -200Celsius, but is thought to harbor a giant hot sub-surface ocean that shoots up plumes of material hundreds of miles up.

"We formed a little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon, and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes, try to see what's going on there?" Milner outlined.