NASA spacecraft finds new 'life world' with warm ocean
The new understanding has greatly expanded the definition of a habitable world - scientists conclude about Mimas, Saturn's seemingly deadly moon.
The new understanding has greatly expanded the definition of a habitable world - scientists conclude about Mimas, Saturn's seemingly deadly moon.
Moon Mimas
Mimas, the smallest and innermost of Saturn's eight main moons, may contain a warm and life-spanning global ocean beneath a thick crust of ice, according to the latest data analysis from NASA. NASA's Cassini mission.
Dr Alysssa Rhoden from the Southwest Research Institute (USA), a member of the Mimas research team, said: "Because the surface of Mimas is very scaly, we thought it was just a block of ice. Worlds with inner water oceans like Enceladus or Europa, too, tend to be fractured at the surface and show signs of geological activity."
According to Sci-News, using models of hot tides, Dr. Rhoden and Dr. Matthew Walker from the Institute of Planetary Sciences (USA) have developed numerical models to provide a reasonable explanation for a class a steady-state ice shell, 24-31 km thick, enclosing a liquid ocean.
The heat flux from the surface reflects very clearly the thickness of the ice crust, so this hypothesis could easily be verified by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The paper published in Icarus suggests that this new discovery of the mid-sized moon could help broaden the search for other oceanic moons, such as those of Uranus.
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