SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Cassini to Search for Source of Saturn Moon's Plumes
from New Scientist
On Monday, the Cassini spacecraft will return to Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, passing within 50 kilometres of its south pole. NASA team members hope the flyby will provide evidence for subsurface liquid water containing the building blocks of life.
Previous encounters revealed huge plumes of ice and water vapour venting from blue-green fault lines, or "tiger stripes", that criss-cross the south pole. The source of these jets, which feed Saturn's rings, is hotly contested.
Gathering data about these features has been slow because only a few instruments can be used fully during each flyby. Early budget cuts to the mission in 1992 limited the ability of its detectors to move independently, so some are often on the wrong side of the spacecraft to be useful.
Read more...
Click here to listen to podcasts of American Scientist Pizza Lunches, informal lectures where scientists present new research to non-scientists. Originally intended for science communicators in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina, the audio slideshows are now available to anyone online. New talks are posted periodically during the academic year.
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.