No Sodium in Enceladus' Vapor Plumes

Details No Sodium in Enceladus' Vapor Plumes No Sodium in Enceladus' Vapor Plumes

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusm.p32a..03s&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #P32A-03

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5220 Hydrothermal Systems And Weathering On Other Planets, 6280 Saturnian Satellites

Scientific paper

The discovery of water vapor and ice particles erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus fueled speculation that an internal ocean was the source. Alternatively, the source might be ice warmed, melted or crushed by tectonic motions. The presence or absence of sodium chloride salt, expected in a long-lived ocean in contact with a rocky core, offers clues. While sodium has been detected in particles escaping Enceladus (Postberg et al., submitted), by far the vast majority of mass escapes in gaseous form. Here we report results from a groundbased spectroscopic search for atomic sodium near Enceladus which places an upper limit on the mixing ratio in the vapor plumes orders of magnitude below the expected ocean salinity. The low sodium content of escaping vapor, plus the small fraction of salt-bearing particles, argues against a scenario in which a deep, salty ocean fuels a near-surface geyser through cracks in the crust. The observed low-sodium vapor is consistent with a wide variety of alternative eruption hypotheses from liquid water or from ice, and offers significant constraints on each. The combination of Cassini and groundbased data may be insufficient to distinguish between these hypotheses.

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