Enceladus

Enceladus, second nearest of the major regular moons of Saturn and the brightest of all its moons. It was discovered in 1789 by the English astronomer William Herschel and named for one of the Giants (Gigantes) of Greek mythology.

Enceladus measures about 500 km (310 miles) in diameter and orbits Saturn in a prograde, nearly circular path at a mean distance of 238,020 km (147,899 miles). Its average density is only 60 percent greater than that of water, which indicates that its interior contains appreciable amounts of non-ice material. Its surface, which reflects essentially all of the light that strikes it (compared with about 7 percent for Earth’s Moon), is basically smooth but includes cratered and grooved plains. The surface is almost pure water ice, with trace amounts of carbon dioxide, ammonia, and light hydrocarbons.

Little was known about Enceladus until the flyby of the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1981. Approaching as close as 87,000 km (54,000 miles), the spacecraft returned images revealing that Enceladus is complex geologically, its surface having undergone five distinct evolutionary periods. Additional observations by the Cassini spacecraft, which in 2005 began a series of close flybys of Enceladus (one in 2008 was less than 50 km [30 miles] away), confirmed that portions of the moon are geologically active today, with extremely high heat flow and associated eruptions of water vapour and ice from plumes (a form of ice volcanism, or cryovolcanism) especially apparent in its south polar region. The activity on Enceladus originates in four main ridges known as “tiger stripes” that appear to be tectonic fractures surrounded by fields of ice boulders. The plume structures extend more than 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from the surface of the moon. Temperatures from the active regions on Enceladus reach at least −93 °C (−135 °F), far higher than the expected temperature of about −200 °C (−328 °F). Jets within the plumes originate in specific hot regions on the tiger stripes. Several relatively craterless areas may be only 100 million years old, suggesting that parts of the surface melted and refroze in the recent geologic past and that Enceladus may have had multiple active areas.

Enceladus’s current activity is responsible for Saturn’s E ring, a tenuous ring of micrometre-sized particles of water ice condensed from vapour ejected by the geysers. The particles are densest near Enceladus’s orbit and are analogous to the cloud of orbiting particles ejected from Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io. The E ring, however, appears to be much more extensive, reaching out to the orbit of Rhea and perhaps beyond. The orbital lifetimes of the E ring particles are very short, perhaps only 10,000 years, but they are resupplied continually by cryovolcanic eruptions. The E ring coats Enceladus and the other major inner moons of Saturn to give them a bright appearance.

Enceladus’s 33-hour trip around Saturn is one-half that of the more distant moon Dione; the two bodies are thus associated in an orbital resonance. Under certain circumstances, such a resonance can lead to large amounts of tidal heating of the inner of the involved moons (see Saturn: Orbital and rotational dynamics), but it remains to be shown in detailed calculations how this mechanism could generate enough heating to account for continuing activity within Enceladus.

Most models for activity on the moon rely on liquid water in the interior of the moon below the crust of ice. The existence of liquid water at the base of the plumes is supported by several lines of evidence, including the high speed of individual particles in the jets and the presence of sodium in the particles. Sodium and other minerals can exist in the water ice particles only if liquid water had been in contact with a rocky ocean bottom from which the minerals could have been dissolved. Not only is there likely water underneath the plumes, but measurements of Enceladus’s rotation show an ocean under the surface covering the entire globe. Analysis of silicate dust grains spewed from the plumes points to the existence of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, where water is heated by much hotter rocky material.