Sentences with phrase «small moon enceladus»

Titan is the only Solar System moon thought to have liquid at its surface, although Lebreton says oceans may lie beneath crusts of ice on Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and even on Saturn's small moon Enceladus.

Not exact matches

This heating ought to be weak, but some unknown process seems to be amplifying it, possibly enough to melt a deep ocean of liquid water on Enceladus, or maybe only enough to form smaller pools of water within the moon's icy shell.

Tomorrow, the probe will spend its last full day in space snapping images of its greatest hits: Saturn and the rings, Titan, a small moon forming within the rings informally dubbed «Peggy,» the moon Enceladus, ring ripples called propellers and finally, the location of its own demise.

Saturn's much smaller moon, Enceladus, features a network of icy volcanoes spewing ammonia, formaldehyde, and other organic molecules.

But Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has lakes of ethane; smaller Enceladus may have a subsurface ocean of fizzy seawater.

Janus (179 km across) is on the far left, Pandora (81 km across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring, Enceladus (504 km across) is centre, Rhea (1,528 km), is bisected by the right edge of the image and the smaller moon Mimas (396 km) is seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.

This strategy was designed to protect Enceladus and other potentially habitable moons from the (small) chance of Cassini colliding with the surface, spreading Earth microbes.

«The global nature of Enceladus» ocean and the inference that hydrothermal systems might exist at the ocean's base strengthen the case that this small moon of Saturn may have environments similar to those at the bottom of our own ocean,» said Jonathan Lunine, an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. «It is therefore very tempting to imagine that life could exist in such a habitable realm, a billion miles from our home.»

Enceladus is roughly the diameter of England — relatively runty for a moon and far too small to hold onto the primordial heat left over from its formation.»