Enceladus eruptions may be curtains, not jets

Los Angeles Times : Water-vapor eruptions have been photographed on Saturn’s moon Enceladus by both the Voyager and Cassini spacecraft. Now, Joseph Spitale of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleagues suggest that those jets are actually an optical illusion created by viewing curtain-like eruptions edgewise. Spitale says that in the more recent Cassini photos, taken when the spacecraft was closer to the moon, the eruptions appear less distinct than in the previous photos. When the researchers tried to triangulate the locations of the jets, they found that the jets’ different angles did not line up. So then the researchers tried modeling the jets as thin curtains of water vapor visible only when viewed lengthwise. The curtains line up well with the stripes and cracks in the ice on Enceladus’s surface. However, Spitale’s team says that some of the jets still appear to be intermittent localized eruptions.