One of many new Cassini images received after yesterday’s successful Enceladus flyby. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute – “W00043237.jpg“
Slow server speeds mark the arrival of new raw data on the Cassini-Huygens website taken during yesterday’s successful Enceladus flyby. In addition to the images, Cassini sampled the material in Enceladus’ water ice plumes erupting [...]

Cassini took this image of Enceladus’ water ice plumes on November 27, 2005.  New pictures and other data from the most recent flyby on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 are expected on Thursday, March 13, 2008.  Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute – “Jet Blue“
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has successfully completed the closest flyby of Saturn’s mysterious moon [...]

In 2005 Saturn’s moon Enceladus was discovered to be an active world with water ice particle geysers at its south pole. The driver of this activity on a moon so small remains a mystery. One possible explanation has been suggested by Dr. Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist from the University of California Santa [...]

Cassini-Huygens mission scientists discovered last year that plumes of ice erupt from the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, but the mechanism for the this process has not been fully explained. Now a review of competing theories and available data implicates the more unlikely source: pressurized liquid water pools or an ocean near the moon’s surface. [...]

Planetary scientists long assumed that the moons of the outer planets were cold, dead, and airless worlds, heavily cratered but otherwise little changed from their original formation. In 1979, Voyager 1, looking [...]

Humanity improves the vision it turns on the universe in two ways: seeing farther than before and resolving greater detail. 2005 was a year of much more detail, of blurry bodies resolving into [...]

Cassini has returned spectacular images of huge plumes of water ice particles emanating from Enceladus, confirming that this tiny moon of Saturn is an active and watery world. Several plumes of various sizes [...]

Out of nowhere emerged a Saturn moon to rival Titan in mystery and activity. Here, suddenly, was an ice world not dead but alive and active, spewing out water ice and oxygen from [...]

The Earth has it, Io has it, and now a third world can be added to list. I’m talking about active volcanism. The Cassini spacecraft finds active icy volcanism reshaping the surface of Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus and spewing water vapor and ice particles into Saturn’s E-ring. What a day for planetary science!
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The tiny moon orbiting Saturn named Enceladus has become the third body in the solar system known to have current volcanic activity driven by internal heating, after Earth and Jupiter’s moon Io. The [...]