Detection of phosphates originating from Enceladus’s ocean

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05987-9] 

By Frank Postberg, Yasuhito Sekine, Fabian Klenner, Christopher R. Glein, Zenghui Zou, Bernd Abel, Kento Furuya, Jon K. Hillier, Nozair Khawaja, Sascha Kempf, Lenz Noelle, Takuya Saito, Juergen Schmidt, Takazo Shibuya, Ralf Srama & Shuya Tan, Nature. 

Excerpt: Saturn’s moon Enceladus harbours a global ice-covered water ocean2,3. The Cassini spacecraft investigated the composition of the ocean by analysis of material ejected into space by the moon’s cryovolcanic plume4,5,6,7,8,9. The analysis of salt-rich ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer10 enabled inference of major solutes in the ocean water (Na+, K+, Cl–, HCO3–, CO32–).... Here we present Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer mass spectra of ice grains emitted by Enceladus that show the presence of sodium phosphates. ...of the six elements—C, H, N, O, P and S—that are generally considered to be critical ingredients for life ..., phosphorus is cosmochemically the least abundant and has not previously been detected at any of the ocean-bearing moons in the Solar System. However, the results presented here demonstrate that Enceladus instead has a high availability of dissolved P, which is thus extremely unlikely to be a limiting factor in the survival of putative life on Enceladus—and perhaps also on other ocean worlds that reside beyond the CO2 snowline in the Solar System (that is, the distance from the Sun beyond which CO2 is in a solid (icy) state and is available as a planetary building material).... See also articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

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