The Cold Geysers of Enceladus

The discovery of ‘potential’ liquid water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, by the Cassini spacecraft, is one of the most important discoveries in the history of space exploration. To read more about it, visit: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=639

For the techno-nerdy, more on Cassini can be found on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens

I think, the term ‘potential’ will linger around this discovery as a prefix, till someone actually sends a vehicle to land on the moon and physically collect some liquid water or some other proof of it’s existence (life?). This may take an awful amount of time and money considering that it takes about seven years for a one-way journey to Saturn.

Anyways, for those devoted to the extra-terrestrial search, this will be a shot in the arm. Liquid water has always been associated with the existence of life forms (according to the current extent of our knowledge (or ignorance !)). However, by the looks of Enceladus, they would be more interested in looking for microbial life instead of some three-eyed, super-elastic, saucer-flying monsters.

Till that time, lets just hope that this is not a false alarm raised/hyped in the hopes of increasing the government funding for NASA’s future missions.