New research from NASA indicates that Saturn’s moon Enceladus may support microbial life. Details of new findings about ocean worlds in our solar system, arising from discoveries by the agency’s Cassini spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope were announced live by the agency.

NASA scientists have detected hydrogen from hydrothermal vents in ice plumes from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus in conditions which they say could have led to the rise of life on Earth.

The discovery makes Enceladus the only place beyond Earth where scientists have found direct evidence of a possible energy source for life, according to the findings published in Science.

Chris Glein, Cassini INMS team associate at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), said during the news conference that they believe the hydrogen is produced by a chemical reaction between warm water and rocks.

READ MORE: NASA's Cassini detects heat of ocean on Saturn moon (PHOTO)

The team says the moon has the sources needed for life, but what needs to be established is if it has enough time to evolve life.

”Although we can't detect life, we've found that there's a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes," said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.

Meanwhile, the Hubble telescope captured more evidence of water based plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. NASA said a similar plume candidate was captured at the same location in 2014 and 2016. The plumes also correspond with a relatively warm region on Europa's surface observed by the Galileo spacecraft.

William Sparks, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said the results are “intriguing as they found a repeating plume candidate at a position of a Thermal anomaly.”

Mary Voytek, senior astrobiology scientist at NASA Headquarters said there might not be life on either moon, adding, if there is life, it might not be very active. She said her money is on Europa, when asked by a reporter which moon was more likely to host life.

NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s will continue the search for life beyond Earth, and will study Enceladus with advanced equipment.

“These ocean worlds have just been discovered – we need to probe them because they are one of the best locations that may harbor life today,” the space agency said at the close of Thursday’s announcement. </s> Today, NASA will announce a new finding which the space agency says will ‘inform the broader search for life beyond Earth’.

A report from a former NASA employee suggests that the finding relates to hydrothermal vents in an icy ocean on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

If true, it could be highly significant – as many scientists believe life on Earth began in similar warm vents on the ocean floor.

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Keith Cowing, who writes for Astrobiology, says, ‘The process is indicative of possible habitable zones within the ocean of Enceladus. Before we go any further, ‘habitable’ does not mean ‘inhabited’.’

The event will be held at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA’s headquarters in Washington at 2pm on Thursday 13th April.

‘These new discoveries will help inform future ocean world exploration – including NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s – and the broader search for life beyond Earth,’ NASA said.

Speakers include several members of the team from the Cassini orbiter, fuelling speculation that the announcement could be about Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon. </s> A natural-color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible, is seen in this NASA handout taken from the Cassini spacecraft July 19, 2013 and released November 12, 2013. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Handout via REUTERS

Ice plumes shooting into space from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus contain hydrogen from hydrothermal vents, an environment that some scientists believe led to the rise of life on Earth, research published on Thursday showed.

The discovery makes Enceladus the only place beyond Earth where scientists have found direct evidence of a possible energy source for life, according to the findings in the journal Science.

Similar conditions, in which hot rocks meet ocean water, may have been the cradle for the appearance of microbial life on Earth more than 4 billion years ago.

“If correct, this observation has fundamental implications for the possibility of life on Enceladus,” geochemist Jeffrey Seewald, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, wrote in a related commentary in Science.

The discovery was made using NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which in September will end a 13-year mission exploring Saturn and its entourage of 62 known moons.

The detection of molecular hydrogen occurred in October 2015 during Cassini’s last pass through Enceladus’ plumes, when it skimmed 30 miles (49 km) above the moon’s southern pole taking samples.

In 2005, Cassini discovered Enceladus’s geysers, which shoot hundreds of miles into space. Some of the material falls back onto the surface as a fresh coat of ice, while much of the rest gathers into a halo of ice dust that feeds one of Saturn’s rings.

A decade later, scientists measuring the moon’s slightly wobbly orbit around Saturn determined it holds a vast ocean buried 19- to 25 miles (30- to 40 km) beneath its icy shell. The ocean is believed to be the geysers’ source.

Several moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn are known to contain underground oceans, but Enceladus is the only one where scientists have found proof of an energy source for life.

“We’re moving toward Enceladus’s ocean being habitable, but we’re not making any claims at this point about it being inhabited,” lead author Hunter Waite, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in an interview.

“The next time we go back … you’re going to take something that not only picks up on the habitability story, but it starts looking for evidence for life.”

Enceladus has a diameter of 310 miles (500 km) and is one of Saturn’s innermost moons. The heat needed to keep its ocean from freezing is thought to come from tidal forces exerted by Saturn and a neighboring larger moon, Dione. </s> A moon orbiting Saturn could harbour favourable conditions to support life, according to new information released by NASA.

On Thursday, NASA announced Saturn’s moon Enceladus was found to have giant plumes containing hydrogen molecules that could be a potential source for microbial life.

The new findings from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2002, indicate that ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and organics were also found coming from the plumes, almost all the ingredients needed to support life on earth.

According to Chris Glein, a Cassini spacecraft team associate, NASA believes the hydrothermal fluids are circulating below the ocean floor and possibly creating a chemical reaction between the water and rocky core of the moon, inducing hydrogen.

According to Mary Voytek, director of the Space Administration Astrobiology Program, the next steps would be to see if Enceladus has had enough time to evolve life in the oceans as the Cassini spacecraft was only able to look for habitability but not detect life.

“It would be wonderful but we haven’t discovered organisms in the ocean on Enceladus,” said Voytek during the announcement.

NASA also announced that their Hubble Space Telescope had taken images of a possible plume coming from Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

Europa is thought to have a global salty ocean underneath its thick crust of ice. Previous thermal images from the Galileo Europa Mission showed a hot spot that was originally identified as a thermal anomaly.

According to William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Hubble Space Telescope captured pictures of a plume emanating from the same hot spot both in 2014 and in 2016 that were almost identical in appearance.

“We looked 12 times and saw it twice,” Sparks said during the announcement. “The statistics tell us that they’re real.”

The next big mission for NASA is the Europa Clipper that will send a spacecraft to orbit Jupitar and make close flybys of Europa. The spacecraft will have ice penetrating radar and thermal imaging to detect what is going on beneath the surface.

NASA stresses the findings, that were announced in the journal Science, do not mean that there is life on either moon, but that there may be favourable conditions to harbour life. </s> A tiny, ice-encrusted ocean world orbiting Saturn is now a hotter-than-ever candidate for potential life.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected hydrogen molecules in the geysers shooting off the moon Enceladus, possibly the result of deep-sea chemical reactions between water and rock that could spark microbial life.

The findings were announced Thursday in the journal Science. NASA and others are quick to point out this latest discovery does not mean there's life on Enceladus, but that there may be conditions favorable for life.

A liquid ocean exists beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, which is barely 300 miles (500 kilometers) across. Plumes of water vapor spew from cracks at the moon's south pole. </s> An ice-encrusted moon orbiting Saturn appears to have the conditions necessary for life, NASA announced Thursday, unveiling new findings made by its unmanned Cassini spacecraft.

Cassini has detected hydrogen molecules in vapor plumes emanating from cracks in the surface of Enceladus, a small ocean moon coated in a thick layer of ice, the US space agency said.

The plumes have led scientists to infer that hydrothermal chemical reactions between the moon's rocky core and its ocean - located under the ice crust - are likely occurring on Enceladus.

On Earth, those chemical reactions allow microbes to flourish in hot cracks in the planet's ocean floors - depths sunlight cannot reach - meaning the moon could also nourish life.

"Now, Enceladus is high on the list in the solar system for showing habitable conditions," said Hunter Waite, one of the study's leading researchers.

The new research, published Thursday in the journal Science, "indicates there is chemical potential to support microbial systems," he said.

The hydrogen detection resulted from Cassini's October 2015 deep dive close to the surface of Enceladus.

Using a spectrometer, the spacecraft determined that the plumes are 98 percent water and one percent hydrogen, with traces of molecules including ammonia, carbon dioxide and methane.

Hydrogen had previously been "elusive," scientists said, but its detection shows the moon's life-supporting potential.

The hydrogen in the sub-surface ocean could combine with carbon dioxide molecules in a process known as "methanogenesis," which creates a byproduct of methane. If there are indeed microbes living in the moon's ocean, they could tap that energy source as sustenance.

Scientists said the moon appeared to have ample energy supplies to support life - roughly the equivalent of 300 pizzas per hour, according to Christopher Glein, a geochemist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.

"This is the first time we've been able to make a calorie count of an alien ocean," he said.

- 'Pushing the frontiers' -Though Cassini does not have instruments capable of actually finding signs of life, "we've found that there's a food source there for it," said Waite.

"It would be like a candy store for microbes."

Jeffrey Seewald of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution echoed those comments in a companion article to the study: "This observation has fundamental implications for the possibility of life on Enceladus."

"Chemical disequilibrium that is known to support microbial life in Earth's deep oceans is also available to support life in the Enceladus ocean."

In a separate study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope again found what is likely a plume emitting from Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons, which also has an icy crust atop an ocean.

After first spotting the apparent plume in 2014, scientists in 2016 saw it in the same spot, which appears to be a particularly warm region of Europa where fissures occur in the icy crust.

Both studies are laying the foundation for the Europa Clipper mission, which is slated to launch in the 2020s.

The Europa Clipper will periodically fly past Jupiter's Europa moon to collect data and study the subsurface ocean.

"If there are plumes on Europa, as we now strongly suspect, with the Europa Clipper we will be ready for them," said James Green, NASA's Planetary Science Division Director.

Cassini is slated to take a death plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in September, after it takes a final flyby of the giant moon Titan and a performs a series of 22 dives between the planet and its rings.

The decision to end the mission was made in 2010, in order to avoid damaging moons like Enceladus, which could be explored for signs of life in the future.

Researchers called its latest discovery a "capstone finding for the mission."

"We're pushing the frontiers. We're finding new environments," said Green.

"We're looking in a way that we never thought possible before for environments in our solar system which may harbor life today." </s> A tiny, ice-encrusted ocean world orbiting Saturn is now a hotter-than-ever candidate for potential life.NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected hydrogen molecules in the geysers shooting off the moon Enceladus, possibly the result of deep-sea chemical reactions between water and rock that could spark microbial life, scientists announced Thursday.NASA and others are quick to point out this latest discovery does not mean there's life on Enceladus (ehn-SEHL'-uh-duhs), but that there may be conditions favorable for life.A liquid ocean exists beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, which is barely 300 miles (500 kilometers) across. Scientists have long known about the plumes of water vapor spewing from cracks at the moon's south pole, thanks to Cassini . The heavy presence of hydrogen suggests chemical reactions between the warm water and ocean-floor rock that could support life.Cassini uncovered the hydrogen during its final close flyby of Enceladus in 2015, when it dove deeper than ever through its plumes of vapor and particles. The researchers reported that the hydrogen, along with carbon dioxide that was also found, could mean that undersea microbes are producing methane as they do in the bowels of our own oceans and waterways."It really represents a capstone finding for the mission," said Cassini's project scientist, Linda Spilker, noting that the spacecraft has been circling Saturn for more than a decade."We now know that Enceladus has almost all of the ingredients that you would need to support life as we know it on Earth," she said at a NASA news conference.A press conference viewer, asking questions of the scientists via Twitter, asked if NASA was talking about bacteria or algae - or giant squids."Most of us would be excited with any life," said Mary Voytek, an astrobiology senior scientist for NASA. "We're going to start with bacteria and, if we get lucky, maybe there's something that's larger."The findings were reported Thursday in the journal Science by a team from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.Launched in 1997 and now finally running low on fuel, Cassini is drawing ever closer to its demise. The spacecraft will duck through the gap between Saturn and its rings 22 times before spiraling out of control and vaporizing in the sky above Saturn this September.Cassini has no instruments that can detect life, so it will be up to future robotic visitors to seek out possible life on Enceladus, the scientists said.Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter also believed to have a subsurface ocean, may have water vapor jets spewing into space as well, similar to Enceladus. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed what looks to be plumes emanating from Europa. A spacecraft under development called the Europa Clipper, to launch sometime in the 2020s, could shed more light on the matter.Voytek said her money is still on Europa for potential life, versus Enceladus, since Europa is much older and any potential life there has had more time to emerge.While questions remain, Thursday's news represents "an important advance in assessing the habitability of Enceladus," Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Jeffrey Seewald wrote in a companion article."We still have a long way to go in our understanding," said Seewald, who was not involved in the study. "Future missions to explore oceans beyond Earth will answer many of these questions." </s> • Enceladus is a small moon of Saturn with an ocean under its surface and jets that blast water and ice out into space.
• Scientists just looked at data from a spacecraft that flew through the plume of water last year and found traces of complex organic molecules.
• The finding isn't proof of life elsewhere in the solar system, but it's a good sign that makes Enceladus even more intriguing for future missions to search for alien life.

"How cooperative Enceladus is," Nozair Khawaja says. The small moon of Saturn, already one of the prime places to look for life elsewhere in the solar system, just got a little bit more enticing. 



Khawaja, a planetary scientist with the Institut für Geowissenschaften (Institute for Earth Science) at Heidelberg University in Germany, co-authored a new study in Nature that reveals complex organic molecules are present in the plumes of water erupting from Enceladus out into space. In other words, all the components in the recipe for life as we know it are present on the small, watery moon—although whether life has taken root is still unknown.



The new research led by Khawaja and colleague Frank Postberg analyzes data from two instruments on the now-defunct Cassini spacecraft that crashed into Saturn last year. Before its fiery end, however, the spacecraft flew through the plumes of Enceladus to collect material ejected from the ocean of water beneath the moon's icy surface.

"The moon freely delivers its organic inventory to the spacecraft in high concentrations," Khawaja says. "You don’t need to drill, not even to land for that. It’s just amazing."



When NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004, scientists thought Enceladus was nothing more than a frozen ice ball. A year later, when the team realized that the moon was in fact spewing water from a subsurface ocean out into space, the discovery was "jaw-dropping," Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker told Popular Mechanics last year.

NASA adjusted its mission to fly Cassini through the plumes of Enceladus to learn about the composition of the water. Because the spacecraft wasn't built for this purpose, however, it was not carrying instruments built for the task. Instead, it had to rely on the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) and the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), tools designed to study much smaller molecules. Even so, the shadows of larger organic compounds have been spotted.

Because Cassini's readings are at a much lower resolution than you'd ideally want to spot larger molecules, the researchers struggled to pin down exactly what they are looking at. Nevertheless, they can say with confidence that there are large carbon-based molecules in the watery material of Enceladus' plumes.



Hunter Waite, the principal investigator for the INMS instrument at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and a contributing author of the new study, says that the Cassini data points to "complex organic compounds that contain benzene moieties, possibly linked by polymeric chains with evidence for hydroxyl, ethoxy, and/or carbonyl functional groups as well as nitrogen bearing functional groups."



"The new organics can be either building blocks (things the microbes consume) or biological remains of membranes (things the microbes produce)," Waite tells Popular Mechanics.

That said, the presence of complex organic molecules is not a smoking gun for alien life on Enceladus. These compounds could have been produced by other natural processes, such as heat and pressure from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, created by the churning of Enceladus' porous rocky core, or even brought to Enceladus by comets.

Contributing author Christopher Glein, a research scientist with SwRI who specializes in extraterrestrial oceanography, says via email:



"Because organic molecules are fundamental to the nature of life as we know it, this finding makes Enceladus an even more attractive astrobiological destination in the solar system. ... However, we know from studying meteorites, comets, and Titan’s atmosphere that organic compounds do not equal life. Cautious optimism is in order."



Life Bubbling Up from Below?

While we cannot say with any certainty where this stuff is coming from, a discovery last year from the Cassini team helps fill in a few pieces to the puzzle.

Before scientists were able to work out the complex organics in the plumes of Enceladus, NASA managed to determine that a smaller substance is abundant in the moon's waters: molecular hydrogen. This finding suggests that hydrothermal vents, driven by the gravitational tug of Saturn, are currently on the ocean floor of Enceladus, pumping heat and nutrients into the water.

Whether or not this is a good sign for life is an open question. On the one hand, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor of Earth can support thriving communities of living organisms, from microbes to tube worms and even crabs. However, the heat and pressure of these ecosystems can also produce complex organic compounds chemically, without any help from life.

"We proposed that the most plausible origin of these complex organic molecules are hydrothermal vents inside the highly porous rocky core of Enceladus," Khawaja says. 



Glein adds: "We can get some guidance from analogous processes on Earth. On our planet, [hydrogen]-rich conditions in some hydrothermal systems create a strong drive to produce organic molecules, either abiotically [without life] via mineral-catalyzed reactions, or by biosynthesis where vent fluids mix with seawater."

So we have two different pictures of what could be happening on Enceladus. In one case, material on the ocean floor is churning and reacting to generate complex organic materials chemically. In the other case, dead alien microbes are decomposing and their leftover organic material is floating to the surface. From there, the organics are ejected into space in icy plumes that reach more than 10,000 above the ground, where our spacecraft can snatch them out of the void.

But to answer definitively one of the oldest questions in science—whether life exists someplace else—we need to send more spacecraft to the outer solar system to continue the search.

"We need to mount a serious campaign to methodically address the life question," Glein says. "A first step would be to fly much more capable mass spectrometers through the plume. This could provide the first hints of life, called biosignatures, such as a strange distribution of organic molecules or isotope ratios that are unlikely to be produced by geochemical processes." If the results from these scouting missions were promising, then additional missions could be launched to look for life directly with "landers, plume sample return, and submarines."

This process has already begun for another tantalizing watery world in the solar system: Europa, the fourth-largest moon of Jupiter. Like Enceladus, Europa is thought to have hydrothermal activity on the ocean floor and plumes erupting into space, so this moon is the target of NASA's next flagship mission to the outer solar system. Europa Clipper is slated to launch in the early 2020s carrying more advanced instruments to look for complex organic molecules and determine their origin.

"We don’t know that Europa has such organic compounds, and we have to wait until we go there," Khawaja says. "There is a need to go back to Enceladus." </s> Could there be life under the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus?

NASA announced on Thursday that its Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn has gathered new evidence that there's a chemical reaction taking place under the moon's icy surface that could provide conditions for life. They described their findings in the journal Science.

"This is the closest we've come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.

However, the scientists think that because the moon is young, there may not have been time for life to emerge.

In 2015, researchers said that there was evidence of a warm ocean under the moon's surface, as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reported.

This posed an exciting prospect — researchers wondered whether that warm ocean might be interacting with rock to create a form of chemical energy that could be used by some forms of life.

If true, it would be analogous to ancient organisms on Earth fueled by the energy in deep-sea ocean vents.

On Thursday, NASA scientists said they have detected evidence that this kind of chemical reaction is likely occurring under the surface of Enceladus. By flying through a plume spraying out of its icy shell, Cassini was able to detect molecular hydrogen.

NASA said in a press release that the presence of hydrogen in the sub-surface ocean "means that microbes – if any exist there – could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in water." Called methanogenesis, it's a reaction that it says is "at the root of the tree of life on Earth."

As the lead author Hunter Waite put it, the reaction would basically provide a "candy store for microbes."

So what exactly could be lurking under the surface?

"Most of us would be excited with any life, and certainly when we're talking about the sources of energy, this is to feed the base of a food web. So we're going to start with bacteria and if we get lucky, maybe there's something that's larger," NASA astrobiology senior scientist Mary Voytek said at a news conference.

The hydrogen found "speaks to the habitability" of the moon, Voytek says. But paradoxically, the large amount detected could make finding life less likely. She explains:



"[The] fact that that we can measure such high concentrations of hydrogen and carbon dioxide mean that there might not be life there at all, and if there is life, it's not very active. ... We have this buildup of food that's not being used. And part of that could be that we think Enceladus might be fairly young."



The findings were announced along with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of another, much older moon — evidence of plumes spraying out of the surface of Jupiter's Europa.

Europa is potentially billions of years older than Enceladus, and life takes time to emerge. And there's "no reason" why the same process wouldn't be happening on the moon orbiting Jupiter, Voytek says.

That's why she thinks it's actually more likely that they'll find life on Europa than Enceladus. "My money for the moment is still on Europa," she says.

It's going to take years for scientists to definitively determine whether there is life on either moon. The Europa Clipper mission is set to launch to Europa in the 2020s.

Cassini will end its mission in September and as NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, it "doesn't have the instruments needed to look for life itself" on Enceladus.

After that ends, it's not clear when another spacecraft will head to Saturn's moon. But NASA's New Frontiers program is holding a competition for its next mission, and Enceladus is a potential target.
NASA announces Saturn's moon Enceladus has the conditions in its global subsurface ocean to support life.