The Saturnian moon of Enceladus is one of our best hopes for finding life within our solar system.

Enceladus is an icy moon with a salt water liquid ocean locked away under its frozen surface, it manages this despite a surface temperature of -200 due to gravitational pulling between Saturn & its neighboring moons in essence constantly stretching & squeezing the moon thus keeping its core very similar to earth.

What makes Enceladus even more interesting is there are deep cracks on the surface of this moon which go all the way down to the liquid ocean below, these cracks create enormous Geysers that fire water vapor out into space.

In about 20 hours the cassini probe will travel within 30 miles of the surface of enceladus & right through these geysers (the distance is less than Croydon to Brighton so its pretty damn remarkable).

Cassini was never designed for a mission like this but has a ton of equipment on board to detect all sorts of things & who knows we might even detect evidence of microbial life as these geysers are really not too dissimilar to the thermal vents you find in our oceans

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Edited by Ouzo Dan (27 Oct 2015 8.48pm)

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The mountains are calling & I must go.

It will take the best part of 7 months to get all the information from this deep dive, we do however stand to learn a lot from this

It would be near impossible to keep evidence of life on Enceladus a secret given how many people are involved.

The mountains are calling & I must go.

I thought this was a close-up of Ola Jordan's calendar for a second

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