Discovery indicates Saturn’s moon meets critical requirements for life...
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Engineers explore ways to sample and identify living microbes in the outer solar system. Digital holographic microscopy, which uses lasers to record 3D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes. No probe since NASA’s Viking program in the late 1970s has explicitly searched for extraterrestrial life – that is, for actual living organisms. Rather, the focus has been on finding water. Enceladus has a lot of water – an ocean’s worth, hidden beneath an icy shell that coats the entire surface...
Read MoreTwo veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other “ocean worlds” in our solar system and beyond. Cassini scientists announce that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Hubble reports additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“This is the closest we’ve come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, as...
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