Plumes on Saturn’s moon
NOV 09, 2009
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.023825
USA Today : Saturn’s geyser-spewing moon, Enceladus —visited by the international Cassini spacecraft on its closest flyby this week—presents planetary scientists with a geophysical locked-room mystery.How does something buried inside an ice ball only 500 kilometers wide provide the pop to propel a plume 965 kilometers out of the moon’s south pole?"The biggest puzzle with Enceladus is where is the heat source,” says Cassini scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , which manages the mission. “This tiny moon ‘should’ be frozen over like the others orbiting Saturn.”
© 2009 American Institute of Physics
