Space Post - Enceladus

[Neil]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1008/09saturn/enceladus.jpg

I love this image of Enceladus! You can even make out some of the water vents at the south pole... We need to get decent probes there and Europa ASAP to check for liquid water!

[MikePizzoff]

Looks like frozen rivers, to me.

http://users7.jabry.com/raysmith/images/enceladus.jpg

[Tricky]

I cant really understand the desire to colonise planets like that, who would actually want to live there? Fair enough if they were mined for minerals people could make a fortune for working there, and there would be some people willing to do that just like certain kinds of people on earth will work on oil rigs or down mines, but personally I'd find it a bit grim!
Nice picture though & other planets are interesting, but I would only get really excited if they found one with actual living plants & creatures on....

[Terran]

It drives me crazy that these planetoids/protoplanets/moons or whatever one prefers to call them are sitting right in our back yard, and yet, are so far from reach.


I am going to digress for a moment regarding the original thread subject to complain briefly about NASA and other Global Space Programs. The complaint is separated by the lines.


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If I was in charge of NASA the whole program would have entirely different priorities.

Main Priority: To establish a permanent human inhabited station or base on some planetary body. Selection for the site of this station would be determined by the secondary priority.

Secondary Priority: Establish industries, structured around utilizing the natural resources of the planet. The extent of which is to have these industries make the base as close to self sufficient as possible. (Moon or Mars most likely candidate for this)

Conditional Priority: If our moon is selected for the Main Priority then repeat the whole procedure with mars (which will be far far more easy if there is a self sufficient industrial complex on the moon (if not nearly self sufficient).

Once there are self sufficient human bases in more than one orbital shell of the sun then we could afford to explore space at a more leisurely pace.
For each additional inter-system facilities we have the easier all other space related projects become....
Imagine for a moment:
A self sufficient moon base providing its own resources, enough not only for human habitation, but to expand on its facilities on its own. They could build railways circumnavigating the moon, landing platforms, fuel depots, and even ship yards. Launching Ships from the moon would require much less energy.

This would translate almost instantaneously into a similar Mars colonization. Much of the technology used to colonize Earths moon would work equally well on Mars.

Once there are bases, everything becomes so much easier...



It is incredibly frustrating... We literally have the technology to start doing this now....Instead NASA spends its limited budget on short term projects with no real vision of the future.
Not only do we have the technology, we've HAD the technology.
Looking back to when we first landed on the moon by this time we should already have a couple of modular facilities on the moon capable of sustaining a small team for a year or two.

Yet all these years and all this money wasted!


There are tons of examples but the biggest is the damn International Space Station.


The space station should be completed sometime around 2011 (or later given budget). Once completed the station is expected to remain in operation until at least 2015, likely stretched out to 2020 so more missions and money can be wasted on it.

This was a ludicrous plan to start with, construction began in 1998 and they already knew then it would only be operational for a handful of years after it was completed. but we keep throwing money away on it!

NASA's 2008 Budget was 17 Billion dollars (0.6% of Federal Budget).

The Space Station cost approximately 100 billion over 30 years.

NASA spent 100 Billion dollars on a Space Station that is only fully operational for 4-10 years after completion! Then it will likely be abandoned and burnt up in the atmosphere over the ocean.

If they spent that 100 Billion dollars on a moonbase sure they would not have been able to send up as much stuff but a base on the moon would be a permanent investment!.:annoyed:


Ug I literally could go on and on about NASA and silly plans...but really its the public to blame not NASA.


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So far from what we know about Enceladus is that if it does have liquid oceans beneath the surface they are likely to be "extremely salty"...
Which without a specific figure probably means saltier than our oceans more like our hypersaline lake. Our hypersaline lakes though do have microbial and crustacean species.

This doesn't mean that life exists in all places where life can live though. "Life" has to start first then it seems to colonize nearly everywhere.

We still do not have a great grasp on how life began on earth other than it seems to have occurred 3.7 billion years ago, which is part of the reason why we want to find Alien life so badly.

There are many scientific models for the origins of life on Earth but thus far there is no consensus.

Most models however do rely on some biochem related experiments.
The Earth, both presently and even more so over the past, has locations where "natural" chemical reactions synthesize some amino acids and other organic compounds from inorganic precursors.
Additionally Phospholipids spontaneously form lipid bilayers, the basic structure of a cell membrane.

Essentially these are the building blocks of life, at least on our planet. Chemical mechanisms exist that put these components together, and once Life exists it duplicates, spreads, diversifies, and fundamentally changes the chemistry of its surrounding environment from it's byproducts.

I always like to say...
"Everything is All Natural...Every chemical reaction possible has already happened someplace, sometime".
There is no meaningful distinction between a natural chemical reaction and a laboratory chemical reaction in the context of the Origins of Life.

We can currently make synthetic life in the laboratory from inorganic precursors in a variety of ways it stands to reason that it can happen "naturally" at some location at some time.


1) It seems that Enceladus currently has geological conditions capable of maintaining life (If hypersaline lakes exist beneath the crust).

2) It appears that Enceladus has had a geo-chemical history needed to generate the needed organic molecules (Cassini found traces of organic compounds, such as carbonates, in the vapor erupting for Enceladus's south pole).

3)Whether this geological history has generated the needed compounds, energy, and environmental conditions for life to bio synthesize still remains to be seen.

So:
If life does exist in Sub-surface oceans on Enceladus...
If this life on Enceladus uses chemical reactions similar to those organisms on Earth....
: Then we can expect certain things from the life there.
They'd be similar to the hypersaline organisms of our planet in terms of their utilization of salt. The food chain would rely upon chemosynthetic bacteria, like the organisms on our planet living on/around hydrothermal vents.

The size and complexity of the animals is dependent on far too many variables. I believe we are still clueless of many of these variables when it relates to Enceladus.....


Enceladus is a great candidate for extraterrestrial life, though there needs to be more information both hypothetically calculated or directly measured for me to get excited.
If the life is just unicellular bacteria like animals and/or, fungal-like colonies I will only celebrate a little.



Currently I am still more excited about Europa....
1) Liquid Oceans....currently estimated to be slightly more than two times the volume of Earth's Ocean (Thats a huge Ocean!).
2)
In September 2009, planetary scientist Richard Greenberg calculated that cosmic rays impacting on Europa's surface convert the ice into oxidizers, which could then be absorbed into the ocean below as water wells up to fill cracks. Via this process, Greenberg estimates that Europa's ocean could eventually achieve an oxygen concentration greater than that of Earth's oceans within just a few million years.....an Oxygenated environment would allow for larger organisms the require more energy! Fish sized things and crustacean like things.
3) The question is how salty is it!



Robert T. Pappalardo said

We’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort trying to understand if Mars was once a habitable environment. Europa today, probably, is a habitable environment. We need to confirm this … but Europa, potentially, has all the ingredients for life … and not just four billion years ago … but today.



And on that bold note if there is no life on Europa and Enceladus, but will support life from our planet then we should seed it.

[soulsyfn]

Alright, I have always thought I was intelligent... well more so than the average person. And reading that post made me feel borderline retarded.

:eek:

---------- Post added at 08:48 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:44 AM ----------


Looks like frozen rivers, to me.

http://users7.jabry.com/raysmith/images/enceladus.jpg

And that looks like a close up of Emperor Palatines skin!

:lol:

[Neil]

I cant really understand the desire to colonise planets like that, who would actually want to live there? Fair enough if they were mined for minerals people could make a fortune for working there, and there would be some people willing to do that just like certain kinds of people on earth will work on oil rigs or down mines, but personally I'd find it a bit grim!
Nice picture though & other planets are interesting, but I would only get really excited if they found one with actual living plants & creatures on....

No desire to colonise them at all... It's just they're top of the list for chances of finding life...

[Legion2213]

Yeah, use them for resources, they also have far less gravity, so they are great for launching ships/probes from.

We should be exploiting the untold riches of these moons and asteriods. Some of these asteriods have more riches on them than our entire planet, the initial cost of getting out there will seem like a drop in the ocean once you start see the financial returns...and then you get the technological and scientific returns as well...and you wake up one morning and realise that we are no longer Earth bound, which would be nice.