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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla




Possible liquid water on Enceladus

Mar. 9, 2006 | 10:47 PST | 18:47 UTC
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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 at a scale of 50 km/pixelEarth (way active)
Venus at a scale of 50 km/pixelVenus (was volcanic somewhat recently, if not now)
Mars at a scale of 50 km/pixelMars (youthful glacier features)
Ganymede at a scale of 50 km/pixelGanymede (maybe maybe internal ocean)
Titan at a scale of 50 km/pixelTitan (youthful surface, few craters, unknown presence of an ocean)
Callisto at a scale of 50 km/pixelCallisto (probably internal ocean)
Io at a scale of 50 km/pixelIo (way volcanic)
Europa at a scale of 50 km/pixelEuropa (super-youthful surface, probably internal ocean)
Triton at a scale of 50 km/pixelTriton (active geysers)
Ceres at a scale of 50 km/pixelCeres (hypothesis, but nothing close to proof, of an internal ocean)
Enceladus at a scale of 50 km/pixelEnceladus and its geysers! Pretty small, ain't it?

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