Cassini at Enceladus: Assembling the Elephant

Details Cassini at Enceladus: Assembling the Elephant Cassini at Enceladus: Assembling the Elephant

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.0901s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #09.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.493

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One of the Cassini mission's most spectacular findings to date has been the discovery of ongoing endogenic activity on Enceladus, granting this tiny moon membership in the exclusive club of demonstrably geologically active worlds. Like the proverbial blind men, a wide range of Cassini instruments have each provided a different and highly complementary view of this particular elephant. The completed picture shows warm south polar fissures continually spraying plumes of water ice particles and H2O-dominated gas into circum-Saturnian space, supplying both the E ring and the neutral O and OH clouds that surround Saturn. Enceladus thus gives us the unique opportunity to directly sample the interior of an icy satellite. Many puzzles remain, however, including the nature of the tidal and other heat sources (in particular, why Mimas has escaped similar heating); the reason for the extreme localization of activity at the exact south pole and whether there is any current activity elsewhere; the heat transport and plume generation mechanisms; the surprisingly low abundance of NH3 in the plume; and the quantitative reconciliation of the gas and ice particle supply and loss rates derived using different techniques. Many of these questions will be addressed by future close Enceladus flybys, which will provide dramatic improvements in data quality over the remarkable results already in hand. The current mission plan includes an encounter at 25 km altitude on March 12 2008, and additional close flybys are a high priority for Cassini's first extended mission, between mid-2008 and mid-2010.

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