THE Cassini spacecraft has finally located the geysers on the moon Enceladus that are spewing water, ice and organic molecules into Saturn鈥檚 ring system.
The spacecraft snapped seven close-up images on 11 August during a fly-by 50 kilometres from Enceladus鈥檚 surface. After stitching these images together, astronomers pinpointed the vents by matching the resulting patchwork to a map of hotspots made in 2007 using Cassini鈥檚 infrared camera.
The vents turn out to be near a set of 300-metre-deep fractures nicknamed 鈥渢iger stripes鈥�, and the images suggest the position of the vents has changed over time. 鈥淭he eruptions have clearly moved up and down the lengths of the tiger stripes,鈥� says Paul Helfenstein, a Cassini scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
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One of the puzzles surrounding Enceladus is that it seems too small to generate enough heat to melt its water. Nevertheless, the presence of liquid water has led to speculation that conditions there make it ripe for life.
鈥淭he presence of water has prompted speculation that Enceladus is ripe for life鈥�
