Enceladus

23rd August 2020 

By: Haris Ahmad 

Saturn is the second largest planet of the Solar System and is frequently known as the jewel of the Solar System since it is so elegant. Saturn was named after the Roman God of agriculture because an ancient myth stated that Saturn introduced agriculture to his people by teaching them how to farm the land. Another fun fact about Saturn is that the day, Saturday is named after Saturn and it means Saturn's day.   

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2020/07/18/if-you-ever-wanted-to-see-the-rings-of-saturn-this-is-the-week-theyre-brightest-and-best/

Saturn belongs to a type of planets that are called Gas Giants which simply suggests that they are made mostly of Gas. Saturn is made up of 94% Hydrogen and 6% Helium and small amounts of methane and ammonia. This planet is the second largest in the Solar System and is famous for its rings. This planet got its rings due to the comets and asteroids that reached its Roche limit and broke into pieces due to the immense gravitational force exerted by the planet. If you're wondering what Roche limit is; it is the limit in the orbit of a planet where objects will shatter into pieces due to the immense gravitational field exerted by the planet. Believe it or not, Saturn has 81 confirmed orbiting Moons and holds the title of the moon king of the Solar System. Similar to the other planets’ moons, Saturn’s moons have also formed by the debris that orbited the planet long ago. Among these exist some of the most mesmerizing moons that will amaze you. However, in this blog, we will talk about one which is known as  Enceladus.  

This moon was discovered when NASA’s billion-dollar probe, Cassini was on a flyby past Saturn on January 16th, 2005. It captured many pictures of Saturn but in some pictures, it saw something unusual. It saw bright lights coming off of the South pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It saw enormous jets of plumes at its south pole that looked like geothermal vents. These plumes looked more than 8000 times larger than the geysers found on planet Earth  shooting jets of liquid 150 miles into space.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA23175

This instantly caught NASA scientists' attention because if that liquid was water, there could be life on the moon, and hence, NASA scientists were now thinking of changing the objectives of the probe. The problem, however, was that Cassini was designed to observe planets from vast distances, not to go close to celestial objects and plumes of liquid. NASA had to change its mission goals and manually repurpose its instruments to make it go through Enceladus’s plumes of liquid to find if it really is water. It took 3 years to reprogram the probe and therefore, Cassini went through the jets of liquid coming out of Enceladus 22 times and discovered that it was indeed water. This discovery was the most important discovery of Cassini and this helped uncover the fact that there are hot and salty water oceans on Enceladus. In the near future, NASA will send another probe to Enceladus to land on it and search for alien life because they believe that Enceladus has all the elements that can lead to marine life.