Slashdot Mirror
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."
Mmmmmm. Fountains of enchiladas.
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.
What was interesting to me was this diagram:
e -details.cfm?imageID=1681/
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/imag
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?