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.

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.