New images from data provided by the Cassini spacecraft provide evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus has been resurfaced with ice from the interior.

Composite images were reconstructed using the NASA spacecraft's monitoring data - gathered over 13 years of exploring Saturn and its moons - to map out the geologic activity on the icy satellite Enceladus.

Years of Cassini Data

The infrared mapping of the icy Saturn moon was taken through the Cassini Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). This instrument collected the light that bounces off Saturn, its ring systems, and its ten major moons. The collected light includes those that are most visible to the human eye, as well as its infrared emissions.

VINS, onboard the Cassini, then sorts the light gathered based on its wavelength - which also gave scientists an idea of the materials detected by the satellite-based on the discrepancies of the light wavelengths reflected off of it. 

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The research team that handles Cassini data discovered that Enceladus "shoots out enormous plumes of ice grains and vapor from an ocean that lies under the icy crust" in 2005, according to a NASA news release.

Geologic Activity in Both Hemispheres

A new interactive model from NASA shows infrared images corroborate with the previously inferred geologic activity, which is more distinguishable at the moon's south pole. In the composite images, the so-called "tiger stripe," marked by red lines of varying lengths, represent the ice and vapor coming from the ocean below the surface.

The same infrared features were also noted in the northern hemisphere, which tells the Cassini scientists that the northern part of Enceladus is covered with fresh ice. Furthermore, it strongly suggests that the same kind of geologic activity that created ice and vapor in the south also occurs in the northern hemisphere. The smaller amounts of ice and vapor in the northern hemisphere, according to NASA, might be caused by either icy jets or the gradual movement of ice through fractures in Enceladus' crust.

"The infrared shows us that the surface of the south pole is young, which is not a surprise because we knew about the jets that blast icy material there," said VIMS scientist Gabriel Tobie, from the University of Nantes in France.

 

The Cassini Mission

The Cassini-Huygens space-research mission was first launched in October 1997. It included the Cassini orbiter, which is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)  located in Southern California, and the Huygens lander that probed the ringed planet's largest moon - Titan. The European Space Agency provided the Huygens probe, which analyzed Titan's atmospheric structure as well as its surface as it landed via parachute. The data collected by the probe was transmitted through a radio link to Cassini, through a probe data relay subsystem (PDRS).

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Cassini-Huygens was a collaboration between the United States' NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency.

Cassini has observed Saturn for more than 13 years. Once it ran out of fuel, and to protect Saturn and its moons from damage, moved to finish its mission by plunging into Saturn's atmosphere in September 2017, continuously transmitting data to the NASA JPL up until the end.


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