Exploring the Potential for Life on Saturn and its Moons — Josh Habka

No, life as we know it cannot exist on Saturn due to extreme temperatures, pressures, and lack of a surface. Saturn’s moons have been found to be highly hospitable for life to exist.

• While life as we know it cannot exist on Saturn itself, recent discoveries suggest that its moons, particularly Enceladus, may harbor the essential ingredients for life.
• Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon, has been found to meet all the requirements for life, including the presence of subsurface oceans and the critical building blocks for life.
• Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed the presence of molecular hydrogen in plumes emerging from Enceladus, indicating conditions suitable for life as we know it.
• The discovery of dissolved phosphorus in Enceladus’s oceans further supports the idea that microbial life could exist beneath its icy surface.
• Despite challenges and uncertainties, scientists are increasingly optimistic about the potential for life on Saturn’s moons, driven by ongoing exploration and new discoveries.
• Enceladus’s subsurface ocean, rich in essential elements and energy sources, presents a promising environment for Earth-like microorganisms, according to recent research.
• While much remains to be understood, ongoing studies and future missions, such as those planned by NASA and other space agencies, aim to further explore the potential for life on Saturn’s moons.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life just got more exciting, with a group of scientists, including Southwest Research Institutes Dr. Christopher Glein, finding new evidence of the critical building blocks for life in the subsurface oceans of the moon Enceladus. The moon Enceladus orbiting Saturn. It appears that Saturn’s icy moon is the only place known to meet all of the requirements for life as we know it, said Christopher Glein, a space scientist and study co-author, in a statement released by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has also detected molecular hydrogen in a plume emerging from the icy surface of Saturn’s moon — a critical component of life as we know it. New research using computer modeling suggests that the oceans of the moon Enceladus, a Saturnian asteroid, must also be filled with dissolving phosphorus, a critical element to supporting life as we know it. According to new modeling, Saturn’s moons’ oceans should be fairly high in dissolved phosphorus, a critical component of life.

If life exists on the frozen Saturnian moon Enceladus, the salty vapor plumes could hold a far greater concentration of organisms than the rest of its ocean — and it is all thanks to the bubbling. For instance, if organisms do exist in Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus oceans, and they are presumed to have originated there, that would lend credence to the theory that life began on Earth at hydrothermal vents — warm, nutrient-rich, deep-sea vents at the seafloor, not patches of water on the ground. If life exists on Enceladus, it is probably made up of microscopic organisms that eat chemicals like carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas produced by hydrothermal systems, says Glein.

While the study does not prove that life exists on Enceladus, it suggests that microbes are a possible explanation for the large amounts of methane. Ammonia, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen have been found present on Enceladus, and studies last year revealed the moon is also home to methane, another potential signature of life. In what could be a boost to our efforts to find extraterrestrial life, scientists found that Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, has built blocks of life that are present beneath its surface.

One of the most important discoveries of the past 25 years in planetary science is that ocean-bearing worlds under ice cover are a common feature in our Solar System. Scientists believe that oceans with liquid water exist beneath the surface, oceans which could potentially harbor life. One of the more groundbreaking moments in this branch of science was finding that cosmic bodies with oceans below the layers of their surfaces — icy moons such as Europa on Jupiter and Titan on Saturn, and even bodies much farther away such as Pluto — are in fact quite common within humanity’s solar system.

Europa, the Jovian moon, is another example of frozen world scientists suspected had a liquid ocean underneath its surface. Recently, scientists have begun to think that a handful of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn may also have conditions suitable for life. In fact, data collected from space probes has shocked scientists, showing that moons with thick atmospheres, hydrocarbon seas, and active volcanoes could all potentially harbor the potential to support life.

Geysers spraying part of the ocean in space — a likely source of Saturn’s E-rings — that the NASA probes confirmed contained some ingredients that might support life. New studies show its ocean contains bounties of the crucial building blocks of life (as we know it, anyway) Life as we know it. Enceladus, that incredibly bright, icy moon, contains all the things astrobiologists think are crucial to the existence of life as we know it: water, organic compounds, and energy.

Beneath its punctured, crusted, rippling shell of ice, Enceladus has an ocean and plenty of ingredients for supporting Earth-like life. Like Europa, some scientists think Enceladus’s ocean is liquid through Enceladus’s gravity.

The Cassini spacecraft discovered subsurface liquid water on the moon Enceladus. They analyzed samples when spouts of water grains and water vapor were vented outwards in space from fissures on the moon’s icy surface. Before ending its mission with a splashdown on Saturn, NASA flew its Cassini probe past frosty plumes of material shooting from cracks in its frozen crust, like a literal cosmic geyser. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. They relayed flyby observations of Enceladus, Titan, and other moons back to Earth for over a decade before burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017.

The probe made it across the atmosphere-bearing moon, capturing countless images and recording sounds on landing. The data to inform new studies comes from NASA’s storied 2008 mission, in which the agency’s fabled Cassini probe plunged through spouts of freezing water vapor, gases, and organic materials emitted by the southern pole of Enceladus. It was an exciting new study that shows just how little we know about the icy Saturnian moon, despite Cassini’s vast legacy.

According to new research from a team at the University of Arizona and the Universite Politiques de Paris, published last month in the journal Nature Astronomy, Cassini’s observations, which found that Enceladus is spewing plumes of methane gas, have suggested that Saturn’s moon Enceladus’s subsurface ocean could be hospitable for Earth-like microorganisms. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn, has made intriguing observations of jets of ice spewing out from the suspected underground liquid ocean of a mysterious world that could harbor hospitable conditions for Earth-like microorganisms.

Before it made its dramatic, deliberate plunge into Saturn in 2017, the Cassini probe had collected data suggesting Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, contains most of the ingredients necessary for life on Earth. At the Berkeley conference, scientists laid out the data the NASA Cassini spacecraft has collected about Enceladus, the Saturnian icy moon — they discussed analyses of its geysers, measurements of a thick shell of ice, ideas about what its ocean chemical composition could be, and much more.

Then, in 2017, NASA’s now-defunct Cassini probe detected molecular hydrogen when flying past plumes of Enceladus ocean, which had leaked out to space through fissures in its pits near the southern pole of Enceladus. NASA’s now-dead probe Cassini found evidence of salts and sands, suggesting that the ocean is in contact with its rocky core, formaldehyde, and acetylene. Modeling revealed a core of its composition by interfacing with the ocean waters on Enceladus, which would have made Enceladus relatively phosphorus-rich, according to the paper.