Scientists could one day find traces of life on Enceladus, an ocean-covered moon orbiting Saturn.
– a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency – investigated Saturn, its rings and moons. Cassini delivered. Enceladus, only 313 miles in diameter, harbors a liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust that spans the entire moon.dust analyzerwho studies ice grains from Enceladus, I’m interested in whether there is life on this or other icy moons. I also want to understand how scientists like me could detect it.
To simulate the detection of ice grains as dust analyzers in space record them, we used a laboratory setup on Earth. Using this setup, we injected a tiny water beam that contained bacterial cells into a vacuum, where the beam disintegrated into droplets. Each droplet contained, in theory, one bacterial cell.
We found these instruments would do a good job identifying cellular material. Instruments designed to analyze single ice grains should be able to identify bacterial cells, even if there is only 0.01% of the constituents of a single cell in an ice grain from an Enceladus-like geyser.
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Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus is able to support life − my research team is working out how to detect extraterrestrial cells thereFabian Klenner is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the University of Washington (UW). His research focus lies on the exploration of icy moons in the Solar System, in particular Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa.
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