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The hunt for habitable (and already inhabited) worlds has largely focused on a "Goldilocks zone" around a star, where it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. But astrobiologists have begun to broaden their search – thanks to discoveries by NASA's Cassini orbiter.
Saturn sits too far from the sun for its rays to melt ice, and yet Cassini discovered that one of the planet's moons, Enceladus, has a vast ocean sloshing beneath its icy crust. Instead of sunlight, tidal forces keep Enceladus's ocean warm. The gravity of Saturn pulls at Enceladus's core, driving thermal processes that create a new Goldilocks zone inside the moon itself.
"It's definitely been a paradigm shift in where you might find life," says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.
Still, it takes a lot more than water to make a place habitable. But here, too, Enceladus delivers. Icy geysers fueled by Enceladus's ocean shoot out from cracks in the moon's surface, allowing the Cassini spacecraft to sample them directly during flybys. What it found is that Enceladus has almost everything required for life as we know it: a source of energy, a source of carbon, and salts and minerals.
Thank goodness for Cassini, after that whole thing about being banned from Europa.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday September 15 2017, @10:34AM
Meh, just terraform it. Enceladus is only about 500km across. here's how it goes:
1 - Build a giant "Belt" around Enceladus, along the boundary between the "Saturn " and "dark" sides of the tidally-locked moon. This Belt is in effect a dam. It needs to be big, reaching all the way from the bottom of the sea to well above the ice. It will be kilometres high and kilometres wide. Think "The Wall" from Westeros but bigger, and made of something less melty than ice. Enceladus' (very) low gravity will help you here. Some "shelving" around the dam might be useful too.
2 - Now build Towers at regular intervals all over the entire surface, again founded at the bottom of the sea (or from the top of the dam). The towers are built to a height of a few kilometers above the surface of the ice.
3 - At this point (depending on your chemical analysis of the oceans & ice) you might want to dump some extra material on the world- probably nitrogen-or maybe oxygen-rich fragments from Saturn's rings.
4 - Put glass panels between the tops of the towers, effectively sealing the entire world in a big glass bubble. Don't forget to put airlocks / docking facilities in somewhere! (Best way to do this would be to build walls rather than overhead panels between some towers, creating "dimples" in the surface of the bubble that go right the way down to ground level)
5 - Use giant mirrors to vastly increase the sunlight reaching Enceladus, and wait for the ice to melt. As it melts, gasses should be released, forming an atmosphere. Getting the mirrors to orbit correctly within the Saturn system would be a challenge. Might be easier to simply run them on rails across the surface of the bubble, moving against Ence's rotation to create a convenient(ish) 33 hour day/night cycle. You'd also get to enjoy a spectacular eclipse every day!
6 - Tweak atmosphere as necessary, with further import / export of elements from / to the ring system and / or mining the upper layers of Saturn's atmosphere.
7 - Tidal forces will cause the sea to regularly slosh in humongous waves from one side of the world to the other. Remember that giant dam you built? Cheap energy!
8 - Introduce terrestrial sea-life, with particular emphasis on the tastier varieties. Build houses, farms, holiday resorts and surf schools on top of the dam. If there was any native Enceladean life (and it somehow survived the terraforming), it now has nice views of the sky as well as access to fast food, reality TV and digital watches.