Latest Enceladus Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online With hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains up to 250 miles high, Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active world in our Solar System. According to NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) researchers, though, concentrations of volcanic activity are significantly displaced from where they are expected to be based on models used to predict how the moon's interior is heated. The team, which included scientists from...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The international Cassini spacecraft, a NASA, European Space Agency (ESA) and Italian Space Agency (ASI) jointly-operated project, has taken some unique pictures of Earth's twin planet from the perspective of Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission launched on October 15, 1997, traveling 2.2 billion miles toward Saturn, reaching the distant ringed-planet June 30, 2004. The orbiter includes 18 sophisticated science instruments to help...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Delivered just in time for the holiday season, another glorious, backlit image of the planet Saturn has arrived from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the planet for more than eight years. Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn's shadow during its 174th orbit around the gas giant on October 17, 2012. This positioning made for a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the Sun and...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the Cassini spacecraft hurtles around Saturn along its continuing mission, NASA announced the fifteen-year anniversary of the probe’s launch this week. The $3.3-billion mission lifted off the launch pad on October 15, 1997 and has traveled over 3.8 billion miles since — flying past Venus twice and Jupiter once en route to entering orbit around the ringed planet in 2004. The mission has provided a treasure trove of...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As the fall season starts to ramp up here in the U.S., observations show Saturn's moon Titan has its own drastic seasonal changes. Astronomers presented findings at the European Planetary Science Congress on Friday about Titan's seasonal changes for the past 30 years. “As with Earth, conditions on Titan change with its seasons," Dr. Athena Coustenis from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France, who analyzed the data, said in a...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers announced at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid on Tuesday that the liquid water found on one of Jupiter's moons may not always be in that state. Europa is believed to be hosting a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath, but a new study suggests that this water does not stay in this liquid state for longer than a few tens of thousands of years. Astronomers believe the moon contains a water shell about 62...

Recent findings from NASA's Cassini mission reveal that Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus provides a special laboratory for watching unusual behavior of plasma, or hot ionized gas. In these recent findings, some Cassini scientists think they have observed "dusty plasma," a condition theorized but not previously observed on site, near Enceladus. Data from Cassini's fields and particles instruments also show that the usual "heavy" and "light" species of charged particles in normal plasma are...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn's tiny moon Methone as part of a trajectory that will take it on a close flyby of another of Saturn's moons, Titan. The Titan flyby will put the spacecraft in an orbit around Saturn that is inclined, or tilted, relative to the plane of the planet's equator. The flyby of Methone took place on May 20 at a distance of about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers). It was Cassini's closest flyby of the 2-mile-wide (3-kilometer-wide) moon. The...

Shortly after passing Enceladus, Cassini had a non-targeted encounter of Dione. At closest approach, the spacecraft flew within about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) of the moon. Cassini's cameras captured several mosaics during this encounter, including one taken around the time of closest approach that covered a fracture named Latium Chasma at resolutions of about 175 feet (53 meters) per pixel. Other mosaics cover much of Dione's northern hemisphere that faces away from Saturn in its orbit,...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be flying within about 46 miles (74 kilometers) of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wednesday, May 2, aiming primarily to learn more about the moon's internal structure. The flyby is the third part of a trilogy of flybys -- the other two took place on April 28, 2010, and Nov. 30, 2010 -- for Cassini's radio science experiment. The radio science team is particularly interested in learning how mass is distributed under Enceladus' south polar region, which features jets...