Sentences with phrase «from icy moons»

Astronomers can learn how to study the plumes of subsurface ocean water spewing from icy moons like Saturn's Enceladus from an unlikely source: Space toilets.

During its mission at Saturn, Cassini discovered plumes of water being vented into space from the icy moon Enceladus.

Not exact matches

The goal is to keep Juno from disrupting any aliens — microbial or otherwise — that might live in hidden oceans of water below the icy shells of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

Suspicions that Saturn's icy moon Enceladus harbors an internal ocean — one that could host life — have hardened into near certainty with exquisitely precise observations from the Cassini spacecraft.

One of the mysteries this gives us clues to answering is how Saturn's magnetic bubble, known as its magnetosphere, gets rid of gas from Saturn's tiny icy moon Enceladus.

Researchers will soon begin studying data from Cassini's gas analyzer and dust detector instruments, which directly sampled the moon's plume of gas and dust - sized icy particles during the flyby.

The spot where Europa's plumes appear to originate (left, with the green oval showing the 2014 occurrence and the blue oval showing the 2016 occurrence) is also the warmest spot on the icy moon's surface, shown in a heat map from the Galileo spacecraft (right, with lighter yellow contours showing relatively warmer regions).

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent pictures back to Earth depicting an icy Saturnian moon spewing water vapor and ice from fractures, known as «tiger stripes,» in its frozen surface.

Zooming into the image reveals the moon and the icy plume emanating from its south pole, supplying fine, powder - sized icy particles that make up the E ring.

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spied jets of water ice and vapor erupting into space from fissures on Enceladus, evidence of a salty ocean beneath the saturnian moon's placid icy surface.

Around the south pole of Enceladus — a 500 - kilometer - wide runt of a moon many expected to be rather inert and uninteresting — the orbiter saw tantalizing signs of activity — plumes of water vapor venting into space from fissures in the icy surface.

The Cassini spacecraft has found molecular hydrogen spurting in the watery plumes from Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, an energy source for anything that might live there

Whereas Pluto's putative ocean could in principle support life, it is probably locked beneath perhaps 200 kilometers of ice and very far from Earth, making it a much less appealing target for astrobiological studies than other, closer subsurface oceans known to exist in the solar system, such as those within the icy moons circling Jupiter and Saturn.

The smooth, icy surface of Telesto sets it apart from most other Saturnian moons, which are heavily cratered.

Researchers suspect that Phoebe's surface has probably changed very little during its captivity, meaning the moon offers unprecedented insights into objects in the Kuiper belt, the icy band from which comets arise.

These forces occur on Earth in glacial ice as it flows due to gravity, and in space as icy satellite bodies, such as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respond to tidal forces from their parent bodies.

Most likely, scientists have proposed, the tidal flexing induced in a moon's icy surface causes cracks in polar regions to open widest while the satellite is farthest from its parent planet but clamp shut at other times.

The disturbance visible at the outer edge of Saturn's A ring in this image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft could be caused by an object replaying the birth process of icy moons.

Based on these facts, and other indicators, researchers recently proposed that the icy moons formed from ring particles and then moved outward, away from the planet, merging with other moons on the way.

New Horizons» flyby of the dwarf planet and its five known moons is providing an up - close introduction to the solar system's Kuiper Belt, an outer region populated by icy objects ranging in size from boulders to dwarf planets.

Saturn's icy moons range in size depending on their proximity to the planet — the farther from the planet, the larger.

Saturn's icy moon spews plumes of liquid and vast amounts of heat from its south pole, probably from an interior ocean.

INSPECTING the behaviour of urine vented from spaceships could help us gain insight into water jets on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, which may contain signs of life.

After Cassini's surprising discovery of a towering plume of icy spray in 2005, emanating from hot cracks near the south pole, scientists turned its detectors toward the small moon.

The key factor in determining if a crack is going to occur is the strain rate, the rate of pull from another body that would have caused the moons to deform at a rate that the top, icy layer could not sustain — leading to cracks.

Eventually, the spacecraft, like Galileo in 2003, will burn up in the atmosphere to eliminate the possibility it would ever spread contamination from Earth by crashing into one of the gas giant's potentially habitable icy moons.

A global ocean lies beneath the icy crust of Saturn's geologically active moon Enceladus, according to new research using data from NASA's Cassini mission.

Stone wants to add the missing piece that could support a booming lunar economy: an outpost to mine hydrogen from icy deposits in the moon's polar craters.

The finding implies the fine spray of water vapor, icy particles and simple organic molecules Cassini has observed coming from fractures near the moon's south pole is being fed by this vast liquid water reservoir.

Enceladus's plumes are thought to originate in water escaping from a subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon's icy surface.

If these rays from the dying star were to wash over a once - frozen moon or exoplanet, the planetary body's icy layer would melt into liquid: setting the stage for life to form in a flowing ocean.

For example, the spacecraft spotted geysers of water vapor and other material blasting from the south pole of the icy moon Enceladus.

When planetary scientists started studying the photographs and data from Voyager and the subsequent Galileo mission that studied the Jovian system during the 1990s and early 2000s, they confirmed this notion: these ridges, or lineae, are fructures, or cracks, on Europa's icy surface, caused be the intense tidal forces of the massive, nearby Jupiter and the orbital resonances with the other nearby moons.

It also would be far easier to get a water sample from Enceladus, which has plumes of water vapor, ice and particles shooting more than 300 miles off its surface, than from other moons, such as Jupiter's Europa, where a massive ocean is believed to be buried beneath a thick icy crust.

«These findings from Enceladus are highly relevant to exploring the icy moons of Jupiter... [The] results are particularly exciting when considering what could be discovered at Europa and Ganymede.»

An artist's impression shows Jupiter's icy moon Europa shooting plumes of water vapor from around its south pole.

Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, shoots water near the farthest point in its orbit from Saturn, when the tidal forces cause cracks at the moon's south pole to open.

Scientists announced Thursday that measurements from NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected hydrogen gas, a key energy source for microbial life, in a plume gushing from a vast liquid water ocean buried beneath the icy shell of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward Saturn's icy moon Dione, with giant Saturn and its rings in the background, just prior to the mission's final close approach to the moon on August 17, 2015.

From the discovery of moons around these icy bodies, the internal composition, mass, density, and internal structure of these dwarf planets has been revealed.

© John Whatmough — larger image (Artwork from Extrasolar Visions, used with permission) Planetary candidate «b» depicted with rings and an icy moon, as imagined by Whatmough.

For example, Cassini discovered that the Saturn satellite Enceladus is a mini-world of active jets — geyser - like phenomena that blast out water vapor and ice particles from the huge, salty ocean that lies beneath the moon's icy crust.

NASA has just released two spectacular flyover videos, of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, created from the New Horizons data offering us the most intimate look yet at our distant icy friends.

Ammonia, in addition to sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate found at Occator, has been detected in the plumes of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn known for its geysers erupting from fissures in its surface.

The strong reflection seen on Mercury is too large to be caused by a momentary «glint» off a crater wall, and when studied in more detail, shares the characteristics of reflections from the water ice seen on Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter.

Heat generated by the gravitational pull of moons formed from massive collisions could extend the lifetimes of liquid water oceans beneath the surface of large icy worlds in our outer solar system, according to new NASA research.

The scientists traced these particles» origin to Saturn's E-ring, which lies between the orbits of the moons Mimas and Titan and whose icy particles are known to come from Enceladus.

Cassini first revealed active geological processes on Enceladus in 2005 with evidence of an icy spray issuing from the moon's south polar region and higher - than - expected temperatures in the icy surface there.

As NASA explains on its website, among other discoveries, Cassini revealed the icy jets that shoot from Saturn's minuscule moon Enceladus, which showed evidence of an underground ocean with hydrothermal activity within it.

These composite images show a suspected plume of material erupting two years apart from the same location on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.