Posted on 03/09/2006 12:49:41 PM PST by Kjobs
LOS ANGELES - The orbiting Cassini spacecraft has spotted what appear to be water geysers on one of Saturn's icy moons, raising the tantalizing possibility that the celestial object harbors life.
The surprising images from the moon Enceladus represent some of the most direct and dramatic evidence yet of liquid water beyond the Earth. Previous claims have been mostly circumstantial, based on scientists' analysis of rocks and other indirect data.
Excited by the discovery, some scientists said Enceladus should be added to the short list of places within the solar system most likely to have extraterrestrial life.
Cassini recently snapped high-resolution images showing geyser-like eruptions of ice particles and water vapor at Enceladus' south pole, scientists said. The pictures do not actually show any liquid water, but scientists surmise that the ice and vapor are coming from underground reservoirs of liquid water near the surface.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Haliburton to win contract to pipe it to So. California
All these worlds are yours except Endeladus, attempt no landing there. ;o)
Someone give this woman a cheeseburger. And some clothes.
Seriously, though, there are a lot of exciting discoveries coming from Cassini. Who would have thought we'd see geysers on a moon of Saturn? Hopefully we can get orbiters to the rest of the planets. There's one on the way to Mercury, but no orbiters for Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. Of course, we have to make it to Pluto with a flyby mission first -- I don't want to think about how rough it would be to actually orbit the planet...
Some things are all about managing gravity.
We appear to be finding out that liquid water is not as rare in our solar system as we first thought. This seriously increases the possibility of life on other planets/moons. The next 20 years or so should be very interesting.
That's some serious saggage of that uniboob...
Daisy, Daisy.....give me....your...aaaaannswwwerrr...doooooo. Poor Hal.
They sure this is H20 and not liquid methane? It's pretty cold out there on the moons of Saturn and one would suspect H20 to be quite solid even under pressure.
All things considered, life is probably not that rare in the universe. Intelligent life might be more than extremely rare... It might be next to non-existent.
Hell, I'm still looking here on Earth. Pretty darned rare here too.
Actually, the conditions for the evolution of complex organisms to the level of sentience are probably very rare, and not all such planets will develop life, let alone complex and intelligent life. By all accounts, without our unusually large moon being in the exact orbit in which it falls, probability of our own emergence is pretty darned low.
Add up the all the low probability occurrences that led to our emergence as a species, and then multiply that improbability by the biological improbabilities involved with evolution and species diversification, and the improbability of our even existing is astronomical.
In fact, if I were an alien, the safe money would be on the Earth not existing, and humans never evolving.
If there is no God, nature does one heck of an imitation.
Yes -- H20 and methane have completely different spectral signatures.
Ship it back to Earth and sell it as 'Pure Saturn Sweet Water' should make bundles of $$.
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