While Titan has a dense atmosphere, Saturn’s Enceladus is known as an icy moon, covered almost entirely in fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System. Researchers believe life could exist in one of its water jets, but determining this would requie at least 100 flybys through a geyser plume with an orbiting spacecraft.
Using the data gathered thus far, the team stated that the hypothetical total mass of living microbes in Enceladus’ ocean would be small. However, a visit from an orbiting spacecraft is all that would be required to know for sure whether Earth-like microbes actually populate Enceladus’ ocean underneath its shell. This icy moon is located approximately 800 million miles from Earth and completes an orbit around Saturn every 33 hours.
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We were surprised to find that the hypothetical abundance of cells would only amount to the biomass of one single whale in Enceladus’ global ocean. Enceladus’ biosphere may be very sparse. And yet our models indicate that it would be productive enough to feed the plumes with just enough organic molecules or cells to be picked up by instruments onboard a future spacecraft,” said Antonin Affholder, the paper’s first author, a postdoctoral research associate at UArizona.
