The Fountains of Enceladus

EccentricAnomaly writes "Cassini has observed fountain-like plumes from the warm fractures near Enceladus' south pole. This confirms what had been suspected from an image taken last January. And seems to point to these cryo-volcanoes as being the primary source of Saturn's E-ring. There are also more images available from Cassini's raw images archive."

Comments

very intriguing

[iggymanz]

let's not launch a couple manned space missions and instead take the billions saved to plop a robot probe in one of these volcanoes to look for life in the underlying water layer.

Re:"hot spot"?

[CheshireCatCO]

Considering that Enceladus has an albedo of nearly 1, it's surface temperature is really, really low. (An albedo of 0.95 gives a surface temperature of 42 K.) So 110 is actually pretty impressive. And a perfectly black body at that distance should have a surface temperature of 90 K.

Re:Amateur Analysis

[msauve]

That's actually rather unfair to us, since there's usually a one *year* propriatary period where the data are the kept by the people who put the work into designing, building, and operating the instrument. Thanks to JPL, anybody off the street can get up at 3 AM to grab the images of the website before we've woken up that morning,

What? Give the people who actually paid for the data equal access, why the nerve!

Maybe if you (and I'm assuming you're somehow earning money by using this data) paid for it instead of taxpayers, you'd have a legitimate complaint.

Show some appreciation, and quityerbitchin.

Re:Amateur Analysis

[black mariah]

His point, dipshit, is that any asshat can start spewing bullshit before people that actually know WTF they're talking about have a chance to scientifically verify the data in the proper way. It IS quite unfair, but then again fairness has never been a part of correctness.

Re:Amateur Analysis

[klaun]

Of course, amateurs are not bound be either rules for peer-review to get published or by NASA's process for press-releases, so their results will often appear on the web sooner than the offical findings. But they should also be treated with a certain measure of skepticism.

Of course, you meant to say that all results should be treated with a certain measure of skepticism.

Nullius in Verba and all that...

No manned space missions == less funding

[David Hume]

let's not launch a couple manned space missions and instead take the billions saved to plop a robot probe in one of these volcanoes to look for life in the underlying water layer.

I think you may be ignoring another effect of no (or to be more precise and fair to you, fewer) manned missions over time -- i.e., less political support for space exploration and lower funding.

People will support a certain amount of funding for heroism, Star Trek, to boldly go... or to at least feel we are on the way there. They will pay far less to support inanimate objects in space. Boring... for most people.

Perhaps, in the short run, the savings from eliminating, or limiting, manned flights would be greater than the loss of funding. I suspect over the long run it would be death.