For nearly two decades Enceladus, a 500-kilometer-wide moon of Saturn, has been a top target in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. In 2005, shortly after arriving in orbit around the ringed planet, the joint NASA–European Space Agency (ESA) Cassini mission found clinching evidence that Enceladus harbored a liquid-water ocean beneath its bright-white icy crust—plumes of seawater spraying up from the moon’s south pole. Astrobiologists have become ever more enthralled by Enceladus ever since, as further studies of the ice grains in the plumes have revealed multiple molecular building blocks of life blasting out from the hidden ocean.
The findings show “there is chemical complexity in Enceladus’s subsurface ocean,” says Nozair Khawaja, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany, who led the Nature Astronomy study.
“These new results are very intriguing and raise the question of what, exactly, is the true nature and origin of organics within Enceladus’s ocean,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist and director of the Ocean Worlds Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was not involved in the study.
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