possibility of ET life on Saturn moon, Enceladus

From NASA a nice work of art... you can get the full size at the link below




Enceladus Ice Volcanoes
Credit: NASA APOD Illustration Credit & Copyright: Michael Carroll

Explanation:

Explanation: In this stunning Saturnian vista - one in a series of artist's visions of volcanos on alien worlds - icy geysers erupt along narrow fractures in inner moon Enceladus. The majestic plumes were actually discovered by instruments on the Cassini Spacecraft during close encounters with bright and shiny Enceladus last year. Researchers now suspect the plumes originate from near-surface pockets of liquid water with temperatures near 273 kelvins (0 degrees C) - hot when compared to the distant moon's surface temperature of 73 kelvins (-200 degrees C). A dramatic sign that tiny, 500km-diameter Enceladus is surprisingly active, these ice volcanos hold out another potential site in the search for water and origin of life beyond planet Earth. Enceladus' ice volcanos also likely produce Saturn's faint but extended E ring.

www.sai.msu.su...

[size-4]Enceladus
Moon of Saturn
March 31, 2008 [size]



Close Up of Enceladus' Tiger Stripes
Credit: Paul Shenk (LPI), USRA; Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Explanation:

Could life exist beneath Enceladus? A recent flyby of Saturn's icy moon has bolstered this fascinating idea. Two years ago, images from the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn led astronomers to the undeniable conclusion that Saturn's moon Enceladus was spewing fountains of gas and ice crystals through cracks in its surface dubbed tiger stripes. Last month, Cassini dove through some of these plumes and determined that they contained water vapor laced with small amounts of methane as well as simple and complex organic molecules. Surprisingly, the plumes of Enceladus appear similar in make-up to many comets. What's more, the temperature and density of the plumes indicate they might have originated from a warmer source -- possibly a liquid source -- beneath the surface. A liquid water sea containing organic molecules is a good place to look for life. Pictured above is a vertically exaggerated close-up of some long, venting tiger stripes. The computer composite was generated from images and shadows taken during the recent Cassini flyby. Nine more flybys of Enceladus by Cassini are planned.

www.phys.ncku.edu.tw...

As to your Avatar...

I am quite certain that you do not mean any disrespect to Susan Boyle?

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/1b010cb2e834.jpg[/atsimg]
www.guardian.co.uk...

reply to post by badBERTHA
you know, I heard about a faith healer who claims ETs from saturn gave him his ability to heal. They had big pointy ears

Originally posted by DataWraith
It could mearly be a water pond full of sterile water, but until we get a probe to land there we'll never really know, and even then would we be told the truth..?

Actually they are sure that the whole planet is a ball of water. The geysers are caused by the ball of water 'squishing' out the end through the ice layer

* A simple model of Saturn’s moon Enceladus to find internal temperature- Keira Brooks - (PDF) - Enceladus is one of Saturn’s 60 moons. It is very small and yet it is also very remarkable. A few years ago it was discovered that Enceladus is spewing water vapor from its surface; primarily from the South Pole. This water vapor also includes other organic materials and gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane

faculty.washington.edu...

See diagram on page one

reply to post by zorgon

Originally posted by infinite

Really?

I, for one, have never seen the photography that shows anything of the likes you are presenting to this conversation.

Well then let me see if I can help... Seems I missed this by a day as I was busy creating the pages on my site

I don't believe this comment by infinite was in response to the OP but instead infinite's comment was in reply to this post by amari

One of Saturn's moons, Titan, has many geometric intelligently designed structures and is loaded with humanoid holograms and statues.

reply to post by AlienCarnage


Yes I do but will not be shared with you I can assure you. The original photo that was released was later doctored to not show geometric structures, Ports and a lighthouse.

reply to post by AlienCarnage


Oops my bad thanks for pointing that out...

Hmmm Titan? Nah not tonight I just finished "Fountains of Enceladus" Titan is a whole new ball game

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
The idea that Enceladus may have an ocean has been known for a few years now.

I made a thread over a year ago discussing the possibility of life on Enceledus:

Isn't that were Dolphins came from? The only real intelligent species on Earth?

Well my daughter thinks so... who am I to argue?

Funny thing when I wrote this I figured, what the heck lets see what Google says...

What I find so interesting is that whales and dolphins might find far, far more friendly extraterrestrial playgrounds than human beings. What might that say about the possibilities for life in the universe?

Enceladus, Europa and Life
www.centauri-dreams.org...

Excellent posts Zorgon, thank you for you effort - that's my lunchtime reading sorted.

Definitely no malice intended on the lovely Susan Boyle, she lives about 10 minutes from me, she's bonkers but lovely.. I just think that picture (Matt Lucas from Little Britain) is hilarious. Sad I know.

Anyway thanks again for you input.

Berth

reply to post by zorgon

Isn't that were Dolphins came from? The only real intelligent species on Earth?

Makes me kind of look at “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”, in a whole new light.

They certainly know when to leave earth; “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”.

reply to post by zorgon


If there are "caverns" within the ice of Enceladus, you could present the case for biological entities albeit minor. However, I must say, how interesting that the Saturn system has significant areas of possible life.

How weird, NASA even talking about "exotic" life on Titan...



SPACE

Originally posted by infinite
How weird, NASA even talking about "exotic" life on Titan...

Why is that weird? Scientists working with NASA have been talking about the possibility of exotic life on Titan for decades now.

I know this thread and news on salt is a couple years old, but I just came across it. If Enceladus is constantly spewing out water, then where is the water source produced? Or will Enceladus run out of water? How did it get it's water and what chemical process has to occur for salt to be present?



Recent News...

Saturn's Moon Enceladus Spreads It's Influence

While a small fraction of the water molecules inside the torus end up in Saturn's atmosphere, most are broken down into separate atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. "When water hangs out in the torus, it is subject to the processes that dissociate water molecules," said Hansen, "first to hydrogen and hydroxide, and then the hydroxide dissociates into hydrogen and atomic oxygen." This oxygen is dispersed through the Saturn system. "Cassini discovered atomic oxygen on its approach to Saturn, before it went into orbit insertion. At the time, no one knew where it was coming from. Now we do."

The power/force of these geysers are enough to support an Atmosphere? Enceladus Atmosphere Otherwise Enceladus would have no Atmosphere due to it being so small thus not having enough gravity to support an atmosphere?

This answer you can look at two ways

Firstly how did life appear on earth comet bacteria? what caused it ? No one can give a definative answer but what we do know it can exist within water regardless of heat pressures etc .

Life all started with water apparantly

Why cant the same life exist on another planet all be it different attributes with heat, pressure etc the only difference with it happening hear on earth .

This is indeed the next step in solar system exploration. Here's a foreword I wrote for a book being published shortly:

FOREWORD

As human spacecraft now close in on the last unreached physical frontiers of the solar system (namely Pluto and the surface of a comet), I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s poetic exaltation of the unique place our generation holds in the entire parade of human exploration. Sagan explained that until our time, people could speculate idly about conditions on other worlds but never hope to discover them, but after us, anybody with the curiosity to ask will be able to get the answers from historical records stored on some handy nanochip. We alone of all humans were present at the transition, at the brief span of time when we converted the worlds of the Solar System from “mostly unknown” to “mostly known.”
This fine book is a tribute to that exploration explosion, as our robot emissaries reached, one by one, farther and farther goals. Its visual value is superb, and the text is a perfect accompaniment to the prettiest pictures I’ve ever seen collected under one set of covers. It offers a narrative of what we have discovered with space probes, with attention paid to how we accomplished it. And it does so with a commendable editorial discipline of not wandering too far astray, except where occasional side notes add to the sense of discovery. This approach perfectly communicates how, even though our far-flung senses and manipulators may be mechanical, their guiding spirit is eminently human, and the exploration instinct these automata serve is based on the human agenda, not on theirs.
It is also breathtakingly visual, especially in the images from more recent explorations. The production qualities made me run my fingers over many of the pages to make sure they weren’t really as three-dimensional as they looked.
This book is not a nostalgic retrospective of a completed, finished task. It is instead a survey of the first of what will be many ascending waves of reconnaissance. As such, it is a guidebook to off-Earth theatres of astonishment that await our year-by-year more capable automata and, eventually, ourselves.
We are realizing that Sagan’s flowery words may have underappreciated the time scale of this sudden explosion of knowledge that we have been experiencing throughout our lifetimes. Young readers need not be envious of the uniqueness of their elders’ extraterrestrial epiphanies, because I suspect the best is yet to come. The knowledge explosion is far from over.
Sagan himself could scarcely have dreamed ― or hoped to discover ― what we are on the verge of finding out: that our Earth-bound, narrow-minded fixation on “life as we know it” doesn’t even apply to our home planet. In only a fraction of a lifetime we have come to realize that most living terrestrial organisms inhabit ecological niches away from sunlight, under thermal and chemical conditions that we now realize also occur inside the skins of at least two dozen other worlds. And we have realized that spores can survive transplanetary trajectories, impelled by natural asteroid impacts, which destroys any notion of biological quarantine all the way back to the birth of the Solar System.
If we reason by analogy with what we now know about the largest component of life on Earth ― the subsurface microbes ― then we have a good basis to suspect that “life” in similar environments on other worlds would also be microbial, not multicellular. But that kind of logic, assuming that “life as we know it” is the limit of nature’s creativity, is the same discredited formula that led us to be so surprised by the current new paradigm of potential ― even probable ― enclaves of water-based “life” elsewhere in the solar system. When fundamental physical and environmental factors are significantly different ― pressure, gravity, radiation, whatever ― what we call “life” can be expected to show remarkable adaptational flexibility. But whatever we “expect,” we should certainly expect to be astonished again and again, and maybe from directions that we least “expect” it! The only remedy is to go and look, go and dig, go and poke around ― and we will.
We are finally ready for the curtain to rise on “Space Reconnaissance 2.0,” as we begin to catalog the biochemical provinces of what we once had convinced ourselves was a dead and sterile outer space outback. Now at the early dawning of that endeavor, this book is a grand tribute to what has been found out so far and to the people who did it, and moreover, it is a testament to the impulses that will power the next stage of exploration and discovery.

concluded:

The last sentence of the author’s narrative is this: “The discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system or beyond will be a defining moment in human history and probably shift future space exploration in directions impossible to appreciate today.” But even though it’s obvious, it bears saying again and again. Making it the book’s last sentence allows it to serve as the jumping-off point for the next retrospective, to be written half a century from now, based on the astonishments awaiting the next generation ― who will NOT be disappointed.

We must be reminded that even Sagan, who was mind-bogglingly poetic, was very likely to have been wrong to think his generation would ever monopolize history's most spectacular space discoveries. The past, as another poet said, is not the epilogue to a vanished age of heroes. The past, particularly in planetary exploration as chronicled here, is only prologue.

Pluto -- probably has more liquid water, under 300 miles of ice, than in all of Earth's oceans.

Right, snowball world Pluto -- now considered a potential abode of biochemistry.

Who could possibly be trying to keep any of this secret? Get out of your intellectual ghetto and drink deep of the fountains of the outworlds. It only waits you to send your mind beyond your self-imposed limnits.

Ah, damn