An Ocean May Lurk Inside Saturn’s ‘Death Star’ Moon

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By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: ...For eight years, scientists have been considering that Mimas, seemingly a pockmarked ball of ice frozen hard, might be hiding a secret: an ocean flowing 14 to 20 miles below the surface. In recent years, such ocean worlds — Europa at Jupiter and Enceladus at Saturn, to name two — have jumped to the top of the lists for scientists who are considering places in the solar system where life could have arisen. One NASA spacecraft, Juno, will swoop past Europa for a closer look this year and another mission, Europa Clipper, is to arrive for a dedicated mission there in 2030. But unlike other icy moons known to possess under-ice oceans, Mimas has a surface that offers no hints of cracks or melting that might suggest sloshiness within. It also stretched scientific credulity that the interior of a moon as small as Mimas could be warm enough for an ocean to remain unfrozen. ...A planetary scientist who thought the idea of a Mimas ocean was unlikely now finds the thermodynamics to be plausible. ...The results were published this week in the journal Icarus.…

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