Scientists used data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft over 13 years to create detailed images of the icy moon and reveal geographic activity.
The new composite images created from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are highly detailed global infrared views produced by Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And the data used to create those images provide strong evidence that the northern hemisphere of the moon has re-emerged with ice from its interior.
Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) collected light from Saturn, its rings and its ten large icy moons – the light that is visible to humans as well as infrared light. VIMS then divides light into its various wavelengths, information that scientists say more about the composition of the material they reflect.
Combined with detailed images captured by IMSini’s Imaging Science subsystem, VIMS data was used to map Enceladus’ new global spectrum.
Cassini scientists discovered in 2005 that Enceladus – which looks like a very reflective, bright white snowball to the naked eye – shoots out of the sea beneath the icy crust giant plumes of ice and vapor. The new spectral map shows that the infrared signals are clearly related to the geographic activity, which is easily visible at the South Pole. The same so-called “tiger strip” blasts ice and vapor from the inner sea.
Infrared images of Enceladus were used to create this interactive 3D globe. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University Ari Rizona / LPG / CNRS / University of Nantes / Institute of Space Science
But some similar infrared features also appear in the Northern Hemisphere. It tells scientists that not only is the northern region covered by fresh ice but similar geological activity – landscape revival – has taken place in both hemispheres. Resurfacing in the north can be due to the gradual movement of ice through either an icy jet or a fracture of the fabric, from the ocean to the surface.
“Infrared shows us that the surface of the South Pole is young, which is not surprising because we knew about jets exploding icy objects there,” said Gabriel Toby, a Wims scientist and co-author at the University of Nantes in France. New research published in Icarus.
“Now, thanks to these infrared eyes, you can go back in time and say that even a large region in the Northern Hemisphere looks younger and in geological timelines, it was not active long ago.”
Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Cassini was an orbiter that observed Saturn for more than 13 years before it ran out of fuel. As part of the mission to protect Nceladus, in September 2017 the mission immersed it in the planet’s atmosphere, which is likely to have the right conditions for life, possibly through hydrothermal vents such as the Earth’s ocean floor in its oceans. Is heated and churned.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Celtic in Pasadena, handles the mission of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designs, develops and assembles Cassini orbiters.
More information about Cassini can be found here.
https://soilersystem.nasa.gov/cassini
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