On October 15th, 1997, NASA launched Cassini-Huygens from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Cassina cracked the whip around Venus twice to pick speed, and did the same around Earth on its way to Jupiter. Cassini took pictures of Julpiter and cracked the whip again to get a boost toward Saturn where it met up with another NASA probe, Galileo, in 2004. Both missions have been analyzing Saturn and her moons, but last night, interested in geysers that have been shooting into space from Saturn's moon Enceladus, Cassini flew through one of the geysers, within a hundred or so miles of the surface of that moon, to send back data to Earth.
I have not seen any analysis of the data, but scientists believe the geysers are liquid water, making Enceladus a prime candidate for Life ouside of Earth. Results should show up on
the Enceladus Blog when available.
Enceladus is the 6th largest moon of Saturn and is one of the few places in our outer solar system that has both water and geological activity (water, land and heat)... another being Triton, a moon of Neptune.
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