Ingredients for
Life at Enceladus
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute
of Technology
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In 2015 NASA's
Cassini spacecraft
made the deepest dive ever
through a plume of gas and ice
spraying from the south pole
of Saturn's moon Enceladus.
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A Cassini science instrument
"sniffed" the plume
and detected hydrogen.
Hunter Waite, Ion and Neutral
Mass Spectrometer Team Lead
Southwest Research Institute:
The instrument acts
like a human nose
analyzing the smell,
so to speak,
or the composition of the
gases in the environment.
There was a significant amount
of molecular hydrogen.
What makes this
hydrogen important?
The existence of
molecular hydrogen,
at least within the
Earth's ocean system,
is a... like a food source.
It's candy for microbes.
They eat the hydrogen,
they turn it into methane.
And with our findings we
were able to not only
find out that there
was H2 in the system,
but to examine the chemistry
that's associated with
that process of taking hydrogen
and turning it into methane.
Cassini previously discovered
there's a salty, global ocean
under Enceladus' icy crust
and that hot ocean water
was coming into contact
with a rocky sea floor.
Here on Earth the hydrothermal
systems known as white smokers
have water-rock
interactions that lead to
the release of
molecular hydrogen
in a similar fashion to,
apparently, what's going
on at Enceladus.
Life requires three
primary ingredients
Liquid water. Source of energy.
Right chemical ingredients.
This is just the final
step that shows
that there's molecular
hydrogen being produced
by these same
hydrothermal processes.
And that molecular hydrogen
has the chemical energy
to support microbial systems
in the interior ocean.
It's not demonstration
of finding life,
but it shows the potential
for the existence of life
in this interior ocean.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute
of Technology
