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:very intriguing

[HappyCakeOven]

We don't need to look for life in the volcanoes. These photos confirm what I've suspected all along: They're out there and they're ice fishing!

Re:very intriguing

[IAmTheDave]

...to plop a robot probe...

Oh sure, 'cause that's worked rather flawlessly in the past. Just ploppin them down.

as the bard Homer would say:

[jspoon]

Mmmmmm. Fountains of enchiladas.

Re:as the bard Homer would say:

[CheshireCatCO]

Actually... everytime we have a telecon disucssing Enceladus, we end up going down the street to the nearest Mexican place for lunch afterward because we end up craving enchiladas. It's great marketing.

Amateur Analysis

[EccentricAnomaly]

Since Cassini is so slow in releasing results to the general public, you may be interested in this discussion (including some neat image processing) by amateur astronomers: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showt opic=1729 This site usually get a jump on the official Cassini channels of about a week.

Re:Amateur Analysis

[CheshireCatCO]

Pardon me, but Cassin is NOT slow to release its results. Some of these images came down in the past two *days*. And I'd like to note that they got posted to the JPL website almost instantly. 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, let alone gotten our coffees in.

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. Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.

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

[tetrahedrassface]

Im very proud of JPL, NASA, and everyone involved with this mission. And all of the other missions for that matter.
Im also proud that the data is released very quickly, and openly.
Its a good thing all around, and we in #space on freenode understand the sensitivities involved.
I assume when you speak of the enthusiast compositions you are referring to the Huygens data?
I understand that all non-official work should be treated with a dose of sceptisim, but some of the images produced by the channel were good enough to be used by the ESA.
(#space irc.freenode.net)
Don't take me the wrong way. I am a huge fan, and supporter and a member of the Saturn Outreach Campaign.
In fact i hope you understand that us geeks are most likely your biggest supporters.
We should be celebrating, not casting stones.
Peace, good luck, and congrats!

JPL is amazing,
D

Re:Amateur Analysis

[fireboy1919]

Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.

You got that right. IIRC, those are the images used in the "36% More Rock Ninjas Coming Out of the Earth than in Previous Decades" paper, presented in 1997.

Explains why they were able to post it so quickly, too. After all, it would take a lot of care to actually get things like that right. Maybe even more than peer review would require, since that's mostly concerned with the text. I'm sure that they recycled. Especially since I've spent the last eight years fighting hordes of rock ninjas.

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...

"hot spot"?

[Amouth]

hot spot "temperatures observed within this region reached as high as 110 Kelvin (-260 Fahrenheit)."

ok.. now if i remember correctly 0 K means that not even the eletrns move.. and 273 K is where water freezes.. so this is more than half way there and this is the hot spot.. what is the cold spot like?

i am not trolling i am jsut currious.. maybe they jsut do werid things when it gets bloddy cold but being able to have eruptions that trow water out of orbit seems a little crazy.

Re:"hot spot"?

[imsabbel]

its not all that scary as long as your gravitiy well is shallow and your atmosphere is thin.

This has nothing really to do with the temperature per se, its more like a side effect.

Also, considering that the background of the universe is only 2.73k, 110k deserves the designation "warm".
I mean, its even warm enough to evaporate nitrogen...
(also, at 0K everything still has the zero point energy, i.e. the 0.5h_bar you can never shave off those pesky harmonic osszillators. Thats for example the reason why helium wont become solid even at 0k and zero pressure...)

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.

I you think The Fountains of Enceladus are cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait till they get pictures of The Geysers of Uranus.

Re:I you think The Fountains of Enceladus are cool

[afaik_ianal]

Why do so many slashdot moderators hate the Uranus jokes? I personally reckon their just Uranus retentive...

E-ring

[game kid]

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.

I always thought those Defense Department guys were out of this world. I never thought they were from an outer planet.

F ring a spiral! Read all about it!

[Darius Jedburgh]

All this news about Saturn and no mention of the news that the F ring is not a ring but actually a spiral!

Sounds like an Arthur C Clarke novel

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a good title for an Arthur C Clarke novel.

Ammonia hydrate

[amightywind]

Pure H2O is frozen rock solid at 110K. But H2O-NH3 ices are not. Try mixing 50% ammonia and 50% water together and putting them in the freezer. The mixture will not freeze but will just become more viscous. Low temperature mixtures of H2O, CO, CH4, or N2 have similarly weird properties. Check this out. The compositions of Saturn's icy moons have not been well established. But indirect evidence like eruptions on Enceladus, or cometary outbursts, suggest exotic icy chemistry.

Looks like another place to search for life....

[Luminary Crush]

What was interesting to me was this diagram:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image -details.cfm?imageID=1681/

In JPL's warm-spot modelling for Enceladus there is an undersurface ocean heated by one of the two now-familiar forces of tidal heating or radiological decay heating (though the former seems more likely).

So the statement goes: "where there is liquid water, there could be life". Do we have another Europa on our hands here?

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.
 

Re:No manned space missions == less funding

[iggymanz]

really?, I think the robotic exploration of mars and outer planets every bit as exciting as moon walks were. And no chance of astronauts being vaporized. Maybe we should put manned space missions on hold until we develop craft that aren't world's largest chemical bombs with low-end tactical nuclear yields. There's no scientific achievement that's been done by man in space that couldn't be done faster, better, cheaper, and safer by machine.

Re:No manned space missions == less funding

[Locke03]

Not that any of the parents post isn't true, it is, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that there's a lot of people on here (me included) that would just about sell our souls to be able to take a ride on one of those bombs, risks be damned. Joe Sixpack isn't intrested in scientific discovery (I know, I live with a bunch of them). They like adventure (shuttle missions or especially something like Apollo) or pretty pictures that look nice on their desktop. And as to the "faster, better cheaper", it seems like NASA should focus on 2 out of 3.

"False-color"

[NthDegree256]

One thing I'm constantly curious about is the degree to which "false color" should be taken. I understand that the purpose of false-coloring is to enhance details and make certain features visible that would otherwise be imperceptible (outside of the visible band of light, too faint, etc.) but I also want to know what these bodies would actually look like to the naked human eye.

Obviously, processed and filtered images are important, and very fascinating (case in point, many of the gorgeous images of the sun,) but it also diminishes the awe, in my mind, to look at a photo of a nebula or moon and realize, "this is not what it actually looks like."

Re:"False-color"

[Java Ape]

I can vividly remember the first time I got to use a "big" telescope - it was the 24.5" scope at Goldendale. I'd been reading "Sky & Telescope" for years, and had made frequent use of a very low-grade refractor. Finally I was going to see deep-space objects they way they looked in the glossy color photos. I dialed in the Ring Nebula (M57), put my eye to the lens . . . and saw a dirty smudge that looked like someone forgot to clean the eyepiece. When I scanned the scope slightly, however, the smudge stayed fixed in space, it was M57. I couldn't believe it -- I scanned several other nebula, with similar results.

I was heartbroken -- the human eye is a lousy instrument for astronony, and even a couple tons of telescope can't fix that. That day my dream of seeing the horsehead in technicolor died.

On the other hand, I soon discovered radio astronomy. Since all the images are false-color interpolations, somehow it didn't bother me that I couldn't "see" the images with my eyes. I got pretty good at jiggling color maps to make aesthetically-pleasing and accurate images. False color is a wonderful technique, and can readily bring out subtle details invisible to the eye. I confess, however, that I long for a magic telescope that would let me see the rich and subtle details of space in real time.