The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Possible liquid water on Enceladus
Mar. 9, 2006 | 10:47 EST | 15:47 UTC
There's been a lot of buzz on the Internet this morning with all kinds of crazy claims about NASA discovering life or something, which are not true. What is true just came out in a press release from JPL titled "NASA discovers potential liquid water on Enceladus." There is not a lot of detail in the release that sounds much different from previous news about the active geysers that have been seen on Enceladus with many of Cassini's instruments. However, the release is happening today because today's issue of Science magazine, which should be out in an hour or so, will contain many special reports on Enceladus, the first peer-reviewed publications to appear since the Enceladus-is-active discovery was clinched in July, and I'm sure there will be lots of new and exciting things to read there. I'll be reading the articles once they come out and will have more to say about it later. But I just want to show a comparison that helps to put in context why it's so amazing that Enceladus is active. Here is a size comparison of all the places in the solar system that have reasonably youthful features on their solid surfaces, or that are suspected to have liquid oceans inside.  | Earth (way active) |  | Venus (was volcanic somewhat recently, if not now) |  | Mars (youthful glacier features) |  | Ganymede (maybe maybe internal ocean) |  | Titan (youthful surface, few craters, unknown presence of an ocean) |  | Callisto (probably internal ocean) |  | Io (way volcanic) |  | Europa (super-youthful surface, probably internal ocean) |  | Triton (active geysers) |  | Ceres (hypothesis, but nothing close to proof, of an internal ocean) |  | Enceladus and its geysers! Pretty small, ain't it? |
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