NASA Cassini Spacecraft Captures Ocean-Like Spray At Saturn Moon

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Source:  NASA RELEASE: 11-196

 Excerpt: NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. …"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus's icy surface," said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the lead author on the paper.  …This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets," said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency's project scientist for Cassini. …Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. For more information about Cassini, visit:
www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/jun/HQ_11-196_Cassini_Enceladus.html

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