Saturn’s natural satellite (moon) known as Enceladus has phosphorus. The findings stem from recently analyzed ice particles emitted from natural satellite ocean plumes, which were detected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The discovery means Enceladus has all the chemical building blocks for life as we know it on Earth.
“Yes, Enceladus does have all the ingredients that typical Earth life needs to live and that the oceans there are habitable for life as we know it,” said Morgan Cable, an astrobiological chemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Engadget (7/7)..
Cassini, exploring Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, collected data by passing Enceladus’s constantly erupting geysers at its south pole and Saturn’s E ring, which also contains particles ejected from the moon. Beneath its icy crust, Enceladus has a warm subsurface ocean, more than 50 km deep, enveloping all of Saturn’s moons.
Eruptions at its south pole spewed ice particles into space, allowing research ships like Cassini to study the chemical makeup of the oceans without diving or even touching the surface of the moon.
Data from previous missions showed that Saturn’s moon has all of the essential building blocks of life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur — except for phosphorus. Reported from Engadget, a team of planetary scientists found nine phosphate-containing grains (phosphorus bonded to an oxygen atom) among about 1,000 samples that researchers initially ignored. The small amount detected reflects the scarcity of phosphorus. “Of the six bioessential elements, phosphorus is by far the rarest in the universe,” said Frank Postberg, lead author of the study.
2023-07-07 11:00:00
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