“Follow the water!” The solar system is full of water in different states, from the Sun’s water vapor to the ice of Pluto and beyond. Water is not only linked […]
The Atacama in northern Chile is the oldest and driest desert on Earth. While tectonic activity reconfigured the shape and arrangement of land masses over the last 150 million years, […]
Water vapor produces a series of diagnostic emission lines in the near infrared between 2.60 and 2.75 microns. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard the Cassini spacecraft detected […]
Astrobiology research seeks to understand how life begins and evolves, and to determine whether life exist elsewhere in the universe. The discovery of diverse ocean worlds has significantly expanded the […]
In this work, we investigate a minimalist model capable of accurately replicating the forced librations of an icy moon with a subsurface ocean.
Editor’s note: What would be interesting to see is an add-on to this cool MBARI app that allows you to imagine biota in the seas of Europa and Enceladus and […]
Over the course of its elliptical orbit, the moon Enceladus is squeezed unevenly by Saturn’s gravitational pull and deforms from a spherical shape into a football shape and back again. […]
The first clue for finding life on other planets is finding liquid water. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter like Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto are suspected of holding oceans […]
Ice worlds are at the forefront of astrobiological interest because of the evidence of subsurface oceans. Enceladus in particular is unique among the icy moons because there are known vent […]
This paper considers how space missions that fly through the plumes known, or suspected, to erupt naturally from some icy ocean worlds (IOW), such as Enceladus, or that aim to […]
