“Of the six bioessential elements, phosphorus is by far the rarest in the cosmos,” said Frank Postberg, the study’s lead author. The tiny amount detected reflects phosphorous’ scarcity. A team of planetary scientists found nine grains containing phosphate (phosphorous bound to oxygen atoms) among around 1,000 samples initially overlooked by researchers. The eruptions at its south pole spit icy particles into space, allowing research crafts like Cassini to study the ocean’s chemical makeup without taking a dip or even touching the moon’s surface.ĭata from previous missions indicated the moon had all of life’s essential building blocks - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur - except for phosphorous. Beneath its icy crust, Enceladus has a warm subsurface ocean, over 30 miles deep, enveloping the entire moon. ![]() “This is the final one saying, ‘Yes, Enceladus does have all of the ingredients that typical Earth life would need to live and that the ocean there is habitable for life as we know it,” Morgan Cable, astrobiology chemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Wall Street Journal.Ĭassini, which plunged to its demise in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, collected data by passing through Enceladus’ continually erupting geysers at its south pole and Saturn’s E ring, also containing escaped particles from the moon. The discovery means Enceladus has all the chemical building blocks for life as we know it on Earth. The finding came from recently analyzed icy particles emitted from the natural satellite’s ocean plumes, detected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
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