On Wednesday morning, Eastern Standard Time, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will undertake an intriguing mission to examine Enceladus' subsurface ocean.
The mission is called a "plume dive," as Cassini will fly into a jet stream that makes its way out of the Saturn moon's icy exterior. Mission managers previously determined Enceladus is completely covered by an ocean that lies beneath the icy surface, The Washington Post reported.
That discovery gave rise to the thought that Enceladus could host some form of microbial life.
"The flyby is not intended to detect life, but it will provide powerful new insights about how habitable the ocean environment is within Enceladus," NASA stated in a news release. "Cassini scientists are hopeful the flyby will provide insights about how much hydrothermal activity - that is, chemistry involving rock and hot water - is occurring within Enceladus. This activity could have important implications for the potential habitability of the ocean for simple forms of life. The critical measurement for these questions is the detection of molecular hydrogen by the spacecraft."
Mission managers will seek to better understand how the plumes form, how they are ejected, and what goes on beneath the moon's icy surface.
"There's really no room for ambiguity," Sascha Kempf, a co-investigator on the Cassini cosmic dust analyzer team at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in a press release. "The data will either match what our models are telling us about the rate at which the plume is producing material, or our concept of how the plume works needs additional thought."
