Announced by the Cassini Imaging Science Team in today's issue of Science, the theory is bolstered by measurements from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS), as reported in the same issue by a team led by Robert Tokar of Los Alamos National Laboratory. CAPS was partly designed and built at Los Alamos.
"During the July 14 close flyby we began getting signatures, far from Enceladus, of water ejection. From the deflections we could measure of the ionized gas in the magnetosphere, it was erupting at 100 kg per second (220 lbs per second), and the data are consistent with measurements from the spacecraft's other instruments. It is actual H20 molecules," said Tokar.
Enceladus is a small moon, but highly reflective due to the fresh layer of snow and ice on its surface. Tokar suggests that the icy geysers at the south pole, erupting from a series of cracks, are pumping a continuous flow of water particles into the area above the moon. Much of the material falls back to the surface as snow.
In addition to constantly refreshing the snowy moon's surface, the geysers also appear to be supplying oxygen atoms to the planet's E ring. Like an icy version of a steam engine, the little moon is chugging around its parent planet, leaving a floating trail visible to the spacecraft's cameras and strong telescopes.
"Our paper, with 12 coauthors from US and Europe, looks at the plasma of hydrogen, water and electrons in the ionized gas of the magnetosphere. The magnetosphere itself deflects in the vicinity of Enceladus, and we measure the plasma and that deflection. That is how we were able to determine the amount of water being ejected," said Tokar.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency and is run by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The principal investigator of the multi-national CAPS team is David Young of Southwest Research Institute.
Images of Enceladus and Saturn are available at http://ciclops.org, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini online.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.