“Now that we know so many of the ingredients for life are out there, the question becomes: Is there life beyond Earth, perhaps in our own solar system? I feel that Cassini’s enduring legacy will inspire future missions that might, eventually, answer that very question.” More About the Mission “This latest discovery of phosphorus in Enceladus’ subsurface ocean has set the stage for what the habitability potential might be for the other icy ocean worlds throughout the solar system,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who was not involved in the study. The flagship mission’s array of instruments ended up making discoveries that continue to impact far more than planetary science. When it was launched, Cassini’s mission was to explore Saturn, its rings, and moons. Whether life could have originated in Enceladus’ ocean remains an open question.”Ĭassini’s mission came to an end in 2017, with the spacecraft burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere, but the trove of data it collected will continue to be a rich resource for decades to come. “This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus’ ocean this is a stunning discovery for astrobiology.”Īlthough the science team is excited that Enceladus has the building blocks for life, Glein stressed that life has not been found on the moon – or anywhere else in the solar system beyond Earth: “Having the ingredients is necessary, but they may not be sufficient for an extraterrestrial environment to host life. “High phosphate concentrations are a result of interactions between carbonate-rich liquid water and rocky minerals on Enceladus’ ocean floor and may also occur on a number of other ocean worlds,” said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist and geochemist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Further geochemical modeling by the team demonstrated that an abundance of phosphate may also be possible in other icy ocean worlds in the outer solar system, particularly those that formed from primordial ice containing carbon dioxide, and where liquid water has easy access to rocks. By doing this, they discovered high concentrations of sodium phosphates – molecules of chemically bound sodium, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorus – inside some of those grains.Ĭo-authors in Europe and Japan then carried out laboratory experiments to show that Enceladus’ ocean has phosphorus, bound inside different water-soluble forms of phosphate, in concentrations of at least 100 times that of our planet’s oceans. Many more ice particles were analyzed when Cassini flew through the E ring than when it went through just the plume, so the scientists were able to examine a much larger number of compositional signals there. The authors focused on data collected by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument when it sampled icy particles from Enceladus in Saturn’s E ring. The archive is actively managed by planetary scientists to help ensure its usefulness and usability by the worldwide planetary science community. Enceladus and Beyondįor this latest study, the authors accessed the data through NASA’s Planetary Data System, a long-term archive of digital data products returned from the agency’s planetary missions. Previous analysis of Enceladus’ ice grains revealed concentrations of sodium, potassium, chlorine, and carbonate-containing compounds, and computer modeling suggested the subsurface ocean is of moderate alkalinity – all factors that favor habitable conditions.
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