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| Artist's illustration of NASA's Cassini spacecraft flying by Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Cassini will make its deepest-ever dive through Enceladus' south polar plume on Wednesday (Oct. 28) [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech] |
The probe skimmed 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's southern polar region, sampling and collecting data on the spray that is believed to emanate from a subterranean ocean.
While the spacecraft is not equipped to detect life, scientists hope that the pass will give them a better understanding of what is contained in the icy spray, how much there is, and if conditions might be hospitable to life.
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| This July 27, 2015 photo made by the Cassini spacecraft shows the moon Enceladus orbiting the planet Saturn. To the north, top, the terrain is covered in impact craters, much like other icy moons, but to the south, the record of impact cratering is much more sparse, and instead the land is covered in fractures and long, linear features. The image was taken in visible green light at a distance of approximately 112,000 kilometers from Enceladus [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech] |
"Mission controllers established two-way communication with the spacecraft this afternoon and expect it to begin transmitting data from the encounter this evening," NASA said in a statement late Wednesday.
The tiny moon orbiting the sixth planet from the sun stunned scientists when they discovered it had an icy plume in 2005.
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| “llustration of the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus showing a global liquid water ocean between its rocky core and icy crust. Thickness of layers shown here is not to scale” [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech] |
The $3.26 billion mission is a joint project by the US space agency, European space agency and Italian space agency.
Cassini is the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, and it has been circling the planet since 2004.
Source: AFP [October 29, 2015]