Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Where have I been?
That’s what I asked myself while watching a program this evening on Saturn. What really caught my attention was Saturn’s smallest moon, Enceladus, scarcely 500 km in diameter, covered in water ice and venting water from geysers at its south pole:
I thought perhaps this was relatively new information, but no; much of the data was gathered by the Cassini craft in 2005. Maybe I ought to resubscribe to Nature.
Of course, liquid water suggests the possibility of life, and geysers suggest the possibility of geothermal heat (another prerequisite for life in this otherwise frigid environment). Wikipedia has more. Interesting that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, has long been the darling of science fiction writers . . . but Enceladus could well be our best bet for extraterrestrial life close to home. A quick google shows that NASA-JPL is at least thinking about a probe that could return to Earth with samples from the polar plumes.
And how cool is that?
D.
