Is There Life on Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus? A Future Space Mission Could Provide Answers - SciTechDaily

University of Arizona researchers have found that the mystery surrounding the possibility of microbial extraterrestrial life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 83 moons, may be resolved by an orbiting space probe.

As the tiny moon orbits the ringed gas giant, it is being squeezed and tugged by Saturn’s immense gravitational field, heating up its interior due to friction.

“Clearly, sending a robot crawling through ice cracks and deep-diving down to the seafloor would not be easy,” Ferrière said, explaining that more realistic missions have been designed that would use upgraded instruments to sample the plumes like Cassini did, or even land on the moon’s surface.

“By simulating the data that a more prepared and advanced orbiting spacecraft would gather from just the plumes alone, our team has now shown that this approach would be enough to confidently determine whether or not there is life within Enceladus’ ocean without actually having to probe the depths of the moon,” he said.

“Considering that according to the calculations, any life present on Enceladus would be extremely sparse, there still is a good chance that we’ll never find enough organic molecules in the plumes to unambiguously conclude that it is there,” Ferrière said.

Reference: “Putative Methanogenic Biosphere in Enceladus’s Deep Ocean: Biomass, Productivity, and Implications for Detection” by Antonin Affholder, François Guyot, Boris Sauterey, Régis Ferrière and Stéphane Mazevet, 13 December 2022, The Planetary Science Journal.