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Squeezing and Releasing Enceladus
This set of images from NASA's Cassini mission shows how the gravitational pull of Saturn affects the amount of spray coming from jets at the active moon Enceladus. Enceladus has the most spray when it is farthest away from Saturn in its orbit (inset image on the left) and the least spray when it is closest to Saturn (inset image on the right).
Water ice and organic particles gush out of fissures known as "tiger stripes" at Enceladus' south pole. Scientists think the fissures are squeezed shut when the moon is feeling the greatest force of Saturn's gravity. They theorize the reduction of that gravity allows the fissures to open and release the spray. Enceladus' orbit is slightly closer to Saturn on one side than the other. A simplified version of that orbit is shown as a white oval.
Scientists correlate the brightness of the Enceladus plume to the amount of solid material being ejected because the fine grains of water ice in the plume are very bright when lit from behind. Between the dimmest and brightest images, they detected a change of about three to four times in brightness, approximately the same as moving from a dim hallway to a brightly lit office.
This analysis is the first clear finding that shows the jets at Enceladus vary in a predictable manner. The background image is a mosaic made from data obtained by Cassini's imaging science subsystem in 2006. The inset image on the left was obtained on Oct. 1, 2011. The inset image on the right was obtained on Jan. 30, 2011.
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PASADENA, Calif. -- The intensity of the jets of water ice and organic particles that shoot out from Saturn's moon Enceladus depends on the moon's proximity to the ringed planet, according to data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The finding adds to evidence that a liquid water reservoir or ocean lurks under the icy surface of the moon. This is the first clear observation the bright plume emanating from Enceladus' south pole varies predictably. The findings are detailed in a scientific paper in this week's edition of Nature.
"The jets of Enceladus apparently work like adjustable garden hose nozzles," said Matt Hedman, the paper's lead author and a Cassini team scientist based at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The nozzles are almost closed when Enceladus is closer to Saturn and are most open when the moon is farthest away. We think this has to do with how Saturn squeezes and releases the moon with its gravity."
Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, discovered the jets that form the plume in 2005. The water ice and organic particles spray out from several narrow fissures nicknamed "tiger stripes."
"The way the jets react so responsively to changing stresses on Enceladus suggests they have their origins in a large body of liquid water," said Christophe Sotin, a co-author and Cassini team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Liquid water was key to the development of life on Earth, so these discoveries whet the appetite to know whether life exists everywhere water is present."
For years scientists hypothesized the intensity of the jets likely varied over time, but no one had been able to show they changed in a recognizable pattern. Hedman and colleagues were able to see the changes by examining infrared data of the plume as a whole, obtained by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS), and looking at data gathered over a long period of time.
The VIMS instrument, which enables the analysis of a wide range of data including the hydrocarbon composition of the surface of another Saturnian moon, Titan, and the seismological signs of Saturn's vibrations in its rings, collected more than 200 images of the Enceladus plume from 2005 to 2012.
These data show the plume was dimmest when the moon was at the closest point in its orbit to Saturn. The plume gradually brightened until Enceladus was at the most distant point, where it was three to four times brighter than the dimmest detection. This is comparable to moving from a dim hallway into a brightly lit office.
Adding the brightness data to previous models of how Saturn squeezes Enceladus, the scientists deduced the stronger gravitational squeeze near the planet reduces the opening of the tiger stripes and the amount of material spraying out. They think the relaxing of Saturn's gravity farther away from planet allows the tiger stripes to be more open and for the spray to escape in larger quantities.
"Cassini's time at Saturn has shown us how active and kaleidoscopic this planet, its rings and its moons are," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL. "We've come a long way from the placid-looking Saturn that Galileo first spied through his telescope. We hope to learn more about the forces at work here as a microcosm for how our solar system formed."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The VIMS team is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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Enceladus 'On' and 'Off'
This set of images from NASA's Cassini mission shows the difference in the amount of spray emanating from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The images from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer show that Enceladus sprays the most when it is farthest away from Saturn in its orbit (left) and sprays the least when it is closest to Saturn (right).
Water ice and organic particles gush out of fissures known as "tiger stripes" at Enceladus' south pole. Scientists think the fissures are squeezed shut when the moon is feeling the greatest force of Saturn's gravity. They theorize the reduction of that gravity allows the fissures to open and release the jets.
Scientists correlate the brightness of the Enceladus plume to the amount of solid material being ejected because the fine grains of water ice in the plume are very bright when lit from behind. Between the dimmest and brightest images, they detected a change of about three to four times in brightness, approximately the same as moving from a dim hallway to a brightly lit office.
This analysis is the first clear finding that shows the jets at Enceladus vary in a predictable manner. The image on the left was obtained on Oct. 1, 2011. The image on the right was obtained on Jan. 30, 2011.
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Bursting at the Seams
Dramatic plumes, both large and small, spray water ice out from many locations along the famed "tiger stripes" near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The tiger stripes are fissures that spray icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds.
More than 30 individual jets of different sizes can be seen in this image and more than 20 of them had not been identified before. At least one jet spouting prominently in previous images now appears less powerful.
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Cassini imaging scientists used views like this one to help them identify the source locations for individual jets spurting ice particles, water vapor and trace organic compounds from the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
Their study -- published in the Oct. 11, 2007, issue of the journal Nature -- identifies eight source locations, all on the prominent tiger stripe fractures, or sulci, in the moon's south polar region. Some of the sources occur in regions not yet observed by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, and the researchers predict that future Cassini observations of those locations will find elevated temperatures.
This false-color view was created by combining three clear filter images taken at nearly the same time as PIA07759. This image product was then specially processed to enhance the individual jets that compose the plume. (PIA07759 was instead processed to reveal subtleties in the brightness of the overall plume that comprises the jets.) Some artifacts due to the processing are present in the image. The final product was colored as blue for dramatic effect.
The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2005 at a distance of approximately 148,000 kilometers (92,000 miles) from Enceladus and at a sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 161 degrees. Scale in the original images is about 880 meters (0.5 mile) per pixel. This view has been magnified by a factor of two from the original images.
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Recent Cassini images of Saturn's moon Enceladus backlit by the sun show the fountain-like sources of the fine spray of material that towers over the south polar region. The image was taken looking more or less broadside at the "tiger stripe" fractures observed in earlier Enceladus images. It shows discrete plumes of a variety of apparent sizes above the limb of the moon.
The greatly enhanced and colorized image shows the enormous extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume.
Imaging scientists, as reported in the journal Science on March 10, 2006, believe that the jets are geysers erupting from pressurized subsurface reservoirs of liquid water above 273 degrees Kelvin (0 degrees Celsius).
This caption was updated on March 9, 2006.
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Quelle: NASA
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