Enceladus’ well-known plume dwarfs the moon itself.
Geysers on Saturn’s icy moon spew water vapor practically 10,000 kilometers into area, a distance about 19 instances the diameter of Enceladus, researchers report in a paper accepted in Nature Astronomy. If the geysers have been on Earth, the plume would contact the sting of our planet’s ambiance.
NASA’s now-defunct Cassini spacecraft found virtually 20 years in the past that Enceladus ejects salty water from a subsurface reservoir (SN: 5/2/06). However the spacecraft’s orbit round Saturn meant it was too near the moon to see the plume’s true extent.
In November, the James Webb Area Telescope turned its highly effective infrared digital camera on Enceladus for the primary time, gazing on the moon for about 4 minutes. JWST’s vantage level from throughout our photo voltaic system let it see the plume extending no less than 9,600 kilometers from the south pole.
“Seeing it so huge, water being all over the place, it was sort of a shock,” says planetary scientist Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Area Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Md.
JWST’s observations additionally make clear how a lot water the plume pumps out and the place these molecules find yourself.
Enceladus has been spewing the identical quantity of water since Cassini arrived at Saturn’s system 19 years in the past: about 10 million billion trillion molecules per second (that’s a ten adopted by 28 zeros).
Roughly 30 p.c of the molecules feed right into a donut-shaped ring — known as a torus — that encircles all the Saturnian system. The remaining water both helps create certainly one of Saturn’s iconic icy rings, or will get blown throughout the system, the place the water might have an effect on the atmospheric chemistry of Saturn and its different moons (SN: 10/8/19).
The plume’s consistency provides Villanueva hope that every time scientists ship one other mission to Enceladus, the geysers will nonetheless be energetic. Within the meantime, JWST will maintain checking up on the moon. “The wonder with James Webb is we are able to level to it fairly often and see if that factor stays energetic on a regular basis,” he says.
