Cassini passes through Enceladus’s icy plumes

Quartz : On 28 October, the Cassini spacecraft passed within 50 km of the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus and took a picture of the moon’s southern polar region. The craft has taken pictures from as close at 26 km in the past, but on this flyby it passed through a region covered in plumes of frozen water and gas. A joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 and has been providing stunning photographs and rich measurement ever since. From the images, researchers have inferred that beneath Enceladus’s icy shell lies a global ocean, and other instruments have revealed the presence of basic molecules. The pass through the plume region was also used to sample that ejected material, and the craft will be transmitting further data from the flyby for the next several days.