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Saturn's Moon Enceladus Has an Atmosphere
Dimentox writes "The Mercury News reports that the international Cassini spacecraft has discovered that Saturn's moon Enceladus has a significant atmosphere, NASA said Wednesday.
The icy moon's atmosphere may be created by volcanism, geysers or gases escaping from the surface or the interior, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
Excluding Saturn's giant moon Titan, which was already known to have an atmosphere, it's the first discovery of an atmosphere on one of the more than 30 moons that orbit the ringed planet."
So? Mars has 2/3 less gravity than the Earth, and it has an atmosphere of sorts.
The link doesn't seem to say, but anyone know how thick the atmosphere is, or what it's made of?
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Excluding Saturn's giant moon Titan, which was already known to have an atmosphere, it's the first discovery of an atmosphere...
Excluding the first it's the first? We have a word for that. "Second".
~Lake
I have a very bad feeling about this...
The icy moon's atmosphere may be created by volcanism, geysers or gases escaping from the surface or the interior, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
Gases escaping?
It's the GNOMES!
As to how thick it is, since it wasn't detected until we got "close" to it, it's probably quite a bit thinner than Titan's atmosphere.
Again,even though this is the field I'm in school for right now, I'm pulling all this out of my butt. So usue the usual grain of salt.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
It's really great news for the mission especially after the wind measurement tool didn't function properly at first. 15 more years, and there'll be a space craft at this moon.
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Link It should be noted that this isn't an atmosphere in the common sense. The air is continually created and lost due to internal sources and weak gravity.
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Wired article as proof
Excluding the more than 30 moons that orbit the ringed planet, it's the first discovery of a moon orbiting the ringed planet!
*Any* atmosphere on a sub-500km wide moon would be significant. I'm looking forward to a more complete report as more information comes in.
Why am I suddenly hungry for Mexican food?
I know this argument is getting old, but this is a good example why we should be spending more money on unmanned probes instead of high-cost, low-science manned missions like the space station. There's little reason at the moment to spend large sums of taxpayer cash on things that provide little benefit. Imagine all the probes we could be sending instead. A whole fleet of Cassinis, Voyagers, and Mars Rovers combing the solar system! Let the private industry (ie. the guys with Scaled Composites and maybe even Virgin ;) take the baton on manned space flight. Hopefully the private industry will find ways to lower the costs so that when we finally need people in space, it'll be practical.
Please bear with me, as I never paid any attention to astronomy-related stuff. I'm just curious as to how many other planets/ moons/ celestial bodies out there are known to have an atmosphere? Is this a really big deal, or is it a relatively common occurance?
It's right here. Why that page wasn't linked to in the first place is beyond me.
The link says that it's made of water vapor, but doesn't give a density. It's interesting, because Europa (a seemingly similar moon - it has the same sort of wrinkled surface) has a *very* tenative (about 1/100,000,000,000th of 1 atmosphere) water vapor and oxygen atmosphere from the sublimation of ice and the breakdown of water from interaction with the solar wind.
I'd imagine that this atmosphere is notably more significant than Europa's, or they wouldn't have described it as they did. And, with less solar energy at these distances, they're speculating that the source is from internal heating causing water geysers. That's really rather fascinating, when you think of it - now we know of another moon with a likely subsurface sea. The moon is a lot smaller than Europa, but it probably has more significant internal heating for its size.
Plus, the saturnian system has a lot of interesting organics - Titan is virtually a drifting mobile organic chemistry lab in its upper atmosphere. Even neglecting Titan, there's the unknown dark organics on Iapetus, Phoebe, and in the rings, among other places.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
After this person you're the first person who has mentioned that.
The Mercury News reports that the international Cassini spacecraft has discovered that Saturn's moon Enceladus has a significant atmosphere, NASA said Wednesday.
Not only that, but I bet there's an entire rebel base there as well!
NASA should better send down a probe there to check it out.
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Oh, it's almost definitely not organics. Encladeus is the most reflective large body in the solar system; it has to be almost pure ice and "gasses" (probably a tiny amount of oxygen from disassociation of water, maybe a little nitrogen, etc). In all likelyhood, it is geysers of water and/or steam that are creating the atmosphere.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
So, you really mean that it is the second moon of Saturn found to contain an atmosphere? Why not say just that?
One of the passes was only 500km in height. Given that Enceladus is 500km in diameter, that leads me to think this is not a very thick atmosphere at all.
For comparison, Titan's 1.5 bar atmosphere is over 500km in height, and Titan's gravity is something like 100x that of Enceladus.
i know bashing the US is cool, but isn't this a NASA project paid for by the US tax payers?
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Homer: Mmmmmm.... Moon Enchiladas.
Comic Book Guy: For your information, my corpulent comrade, it's "Enceladus," who in Greek mythology was a giant who was defeated in battle and buried under Mount Etna by Athena.
Wrong moon. You want Mimas.
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...The icy moon's atmosphere may be created by ...gases escaping from ... the interior...
That could describe a lot of people I know.
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Excluding the posts above, I *finally* have a first post.....
Shouldn't the Saturn News be reporting this?
Is more like a few of those super-ball thingies bouncing around a really roomy tank. The particles don't even interract with each other: the most prevalent collision is by far the particles with the surface. In fact, there's some question about solar pressure 'blowing' away the atmosphere. (though it would be replenished by solar wind particles) On earth would be very difficult to get a vacuum of the quality of mercury's "atmosphere." calling it a trace is extremely generous.
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Cassini is NASA. ESA was the Huygens probe.
If both NASA and the ESA want to share credit for the whole mission, fine, I'd go with that. But that didn't seem to be the attitude when the Huygens probe landed on Titan. When that happened, I recall the ESA being *very* specific that it was their probe- and their accomplishment, and not NASA's. I thought that was a bit rude. In other words they want to share partial credit for what isn't thiers, but they want to take total credit for what is theirs.
Alternatively, since gravity appears to be insufficient to hold the atmosphere in, if the northern hemisphere's atmosphere and southern hemisphere's atmosphere never interact (eg: there's nothing left of either by the time you reach the equator) then you could again argue that they should be considered distinct and not part of a single whole atmosphere.
Of course, these are highly improbable, but this IS Slashdot.
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Our sysadmin's cube also has an atmosphere created by gas escaping.
Just in case you actually care. The reason spinning space stations don't work is called coriolis acceleration. Basically spinning results in horizontal as well as vertical acceleration. The vertical is what you want. The horizonal is what disorients and makes astronauts sick. Now, if you happen to have a really really big wheel you can reduce the effects of coriolis acceleration but yeah, you need all that mass. One solution to this is to use a tether and spin a small station around a very very long axis (like kms). That's great an all but 1) it doesn't work in low earth orbit and 2) if the tether breaks you've got a nice uncontrollable projectile there. Then there's the actual problem of getting it spinning in the first place.
How we know is more important than what we know.