Saturn’s moon Enceladus is unique in our Solar System — with plumes of water vapor and ice perpetually erupting, shooting jets hundreds of miles into space from its global subsurface ocean through cracks —parallel, evenly spaced “stripes” that are some 130 kilometers long and 35 kilometers apart–on Enceladus’s ice-encased surface providing an intriguing glimpse into what the moon’s subsurface ocean might contain, possibly providing conditions favorable to life. The answer, a new study has found, may lie in the plumes.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”