Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has a lot of water, but even if life does exist there in some microbial fashion, the difficulty for scientists on Earth is identifying those microbes from 790 million miles away.
"It's harder to distinguish between a microbe and a speck of dust than you'd think," said Jay Nadeau, a research professor at California Institute of Technology in the US.
Enceladus has enormous geysers, venting water vapour through cracks in the moon's icy shell, regularly jet out into space.
When the Saturn probe Cassini flew by Enceladus in 2005, it spotted water vapour plumes in the south polar region blasting icy particles at nearly 2,000 kilometers per hour to an altitude of nearly 500 kilometers above the surface. Read more...
"It's harder to distinguish between a microbe and a speck of dust than you'd think," said Jay Nadeau, a research professor at California Institute of Technology in the US.
Enceladus has enormous geysers, venting water vapour through cracks in the moon's icy shell, regularly jet out into space.
When the Saturn probe Cassini flew by Enceladus in 2005, it spotted water vapour plumes in the south polar region blasting icy particles at nearly 2,000 kilometers per hour to an altitude of nearly 500 kilometers above the surface. Read more...