NASA Finds Evidence Enceladus is More Habitable and More Likely to Have Microbial Life

Analysis of the Cassini probe data shows evidence for Enceladus habitability a step further. They’ve found strong confirmation of hydrogen cyanide, a molecule that is key to the origin of life.

The ocean below the ice of Saturn’s moon holds a powerful source of chemical energy. Unidentified until now, the energy source is in the form of several organic compounds, some of which, on Earth, serve as fuel for organisms. The more energy available, the more likely that life might proliferate and be sustained.

Odds Are High Enceladus Has Microbial Life In Its Liquid Ocean

Enceladus has a multiphasic and compositionally diverse chemical environment that is consistent with a habitable subsurface ocean. The species identified in this work also suggest that this ocean may contain the necessary building blocks required to synthesize compounds important to the origin of life.

Nextbigfuture thinks that, eventually, it will likely be proven that IF you have liquid water anywhere in space then it will be filled with at least microbial life. IF the water is liquid then there will be the energy to get the life supporting chemicals to support a biome (bacterial environment).

There are at least eight other locations in the solar system with liquid water. The other eight have liquid oceans underneath a lot of ice on moons and asteroids. The most common way to find liquid water in space is under a lot of ice.

Lead author Jonah Peter, a doctoral student at Harvard University who performed much of the research while working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved.”

The detections of partially oxidized hydrocarbons along with the very likely detections of an alcohol and molecular O2 are particularly interesting as these species potentially imply a diverse redox environment within the ocean.

Nature – Detection of HCN and diverse redox chemistry in the plume of Enceladus

The Cassini spacecraft observed that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a series of jets erupting from its South Polar Terrain. Previous studies of in situ data collected by Cassini’s Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) have identified H2O, CO2, CH4, NH3 and H2 within the plume of ejected material. Identification of minor species in the plume remains an ongoing challenge, owing to the large number of possible combinations that can be used to fit the INMS data. Here we present the detection of several additional compounds of strong importance to the habitability of Enceladus, including HCN, C2H2, C3H6 and C2H6. Our analyses of the low-velocity INMS data, coupled with our detailed statistical framework, enable discrimination between previously ambiguous species in the plume by alleviating the effects of high-dimensional model fitting. Together with plausible mineralogical catalysts and redox gradients derived from surface radiolysis, these compounds could potentially support extant microbial communities or drive complex organic synthesis leading to the origin of life