The search for life in our solar system often involves efforts to detect organic molecules, which have been found on many extraterrestrial bodies, including planets, moons, meteorites, comets, and asteroids. […]
In this work, we investigate a minimalist model capable of accurately replicating the forced librations of an icy moon with a subsurface ocean.
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 […]
During 2019 field tests near Greenland’s Summit Station, a high-elevation remote observing station, the WATSON (Wireline Analysis Tool for the Subsurface Observation of Northern ice sheets) instrument is put through […]
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 […]
A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyses them for […]
Enceladus is the Saturnian satellite known to have water vapor erupting from its south pole region called Tiger Stripes.
The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of […]
Icy moons with subsurface oceans of liquid water rank among the most promising astrobiological targets in our Solar System.
