‘Update (12:00 p.m. Pacific time): a press release has been made about this by the Cassini Imaging Team.
I have been getting email about a potentially "huge" NASA announcement scheduled for 2:00 p.m. today (Eastern) . It was originally broken by a Florida news station (the link may be down due to its getting slammed), but it looks as if this is somewhat overblown.
Keith Cowing at NASAWatch.com looked into it earlier (being on the west coast puts me behind other investigators, dagnappit) and he says that this may be a case of someone in the media getting overzealous, and the story snowballed. The story (which is up at Matt Drudge’s website *) is about plumes of what is possibly water from geysers on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, which would be pretty cool — liquid water is not definitively known to exist anywhere else in the solar system but here (Europa’s undersurface ocean is inferred, and probably real, but not directly detected) , and Enceladus is known to have plumes (the image at the top of this post shows one such plume back in November 2005). Liquid water on another body in the solar system really is amazing stuff!
So while this is a pretty interesting story to say the least, it’s not enough to cause quite the hubbub it has in the media. So what’s going on? It turns out that in their announcement, the Florida news station talked about "possible life in our solar system" which is certainly jumping a very large gun and is not at all a warranted from the scientific claims in the press release.
We’ll see what’s what in a few hours, I suppose. In the meantime, Keith at NASAWatch makes an excellent point in his article: clearly the media, and the public, think that looking for life is big news. So why is NASA gutting the astrobiology budget?
* Drudge’s posting of the press release appears to violate an embargo, a voluntary delay in the releasing of news so that everyone gets an equal share of being able to report it. I would never break an embargo (and for some reason I never got this press release that Drudge has, which is odd), but since it’s already up on the Drudge report, and the email is flying, it’s best in my opinion to get this out in the open now.‘
March 9th, 2006 at 10:56 am
We be all over this story at Stars Over Kansas – we’ll post the press release at 1pm CST which is when I guess it will be released.
Phil, did you mean Europa instead of Io in this story? Drudge should not be doing this to you so early in the morning.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Yeah, I fixed that.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:23 am
If “possible life in the solar system” causes all this chaos, I wouldn’t want these people to notice all the animals and plants here on Earth.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:44 am
So the big announcement is that it’s liquid water and not just ice?
Seems like something of a tease.
March 9th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Liquid water is a big deal, because liquid water is very hospitable toward life. On Earth, wherever there is liquid water, there is life. There are also a few places where life exists in ice, but it grows incredibly slowly. So, the fact that Enceladus is emitting a plume of liquid water (well, if it is established as fact) suggests there is liquid water beneath its surface, that may, in some ways, resemble the postulated ocean beneath the surface of Europa.
March 9th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Hopefully, exploits like ignoring a requested publication embargo will result in Matrt Drudge not receiving advance press releases in the future. Yeah, I know. We can all dream, can’t we?
March 9th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Those of us who are anxious to discover the fish on Europa (you know, the ones swimming around under those miles of ice on the surface) are pretty excited about the possibilty of fish on Enceladus, where they might be a little easier to catch. Well, OK, after you travel a few more AU away from the sun. Anyone care to calculate the cost of ice drilling near Jupiter versus ice fishing near Saturn?
March 9th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Mmm, Enceladian fish. Sauteed? A light garlic/butter sauce, I think. Asparagus.
March 9th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
you forgot lemon
March 9th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
and definitly no asparagus (i hate it)
March 9th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
but seriously i think possability of aliens is exciting but i think we should discover all the life on earth 1st
March 9th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
I heard about it this morning. Is it a real possibility to have lifeforms as big as a fish? I was under the impresion it would be more like microscopic life if any. But it is pretty facinating.
March 9th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Why drill, when you can catch the freeze-fried fish that comes up from below?
March 9th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
I’ve never had fish encheladus, but I’ve had shrimp enchilada.
Looks like CICLOPS has their eye wide open!
“We may have just stumbled upon the Holy Grail of modern day planetary exploration. It doesn’t get any more exciting than this.”
Very exciting. clap, clap, bravo! I’ll take this water show over the Venetian.
March 9th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
The depressing thought is that once extraterrestrial life is discovered, Drudge is where we’ll find out about it.
As for gun-jumping… don’t you know that every single space science story is only relevant to the media insofar as it pertains to the discovery of life? Direct observance of liquid water on another planet ought to be a big scoop, but it’ll only get on the front page if you include the sentence, ‘Scientists believe the presence of water increases the chance of finding life.’
March 9th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Where does the heat come from to keep water in a liquid state? Enceladus is only about 500 km in diameter. Can there be volcanic activity on such a small body?
March 9th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I’m with Grumpy.
Liquid water is a big deal- huge, in fact- and warrants most of the rhetoric that’s been tossed out… if only the ensuing attention could have been used to explain why that’s so, and some of the foundational information for the bug-eyed aliens which seize the public’s imagination. Then the story itself could have done some good for people’s understanding of the science behind the excitement.
Instead, we have overspin and underenthusiasm because there’ve been no substantive explanations offered in the press.
Sagan was right. Consistently catering to the lowest common denominator makes the common denominator very low indeed.
March 9th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Posting as just someone who happened to read the book recently, there’s this quote from the book HER NAME, TITANIC by Charles Pellegrino (1988), in the context of a conversation with Dr. Robert Ballard about frontiers and oceans:
PELLEGRINO: “We’re almost certain that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has an ocean of liquid water under the ice, and probably Jupiter’s Europa.”
The dust jacket blurb says in the late 1970s, Pellegrino and Dr. Jesse Stoff “produced the original models that predicted the discovery of oceans inside the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.”
So this has been suspected for a while…?
March 9th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
The papers are out in Science.
Cassini Observes the Active South Pole of Enceladus, Porco et al.
Enceladus’ Water Vapor Plume, by Candice J. Hansen et al.
Cassini Encounters Enceladus: Background and the Discovery of a South Polar Hot Spot, by J. R. Spencer et al.
We are talking about a few gigawatts of power being detected. It’s indeed big news, life or no life attached.
March 9th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Nuts, I’ll have to wait for that issue to be delivered; I don’t have online access. One of the more interesting big deals about all this is that she thinks the ice may be very thin, with liquid water just a few tens of meters below the surface. The press release doesn’t say why she thinks that, but the paper will.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
It looks like the Science papers are the same as what was reported at the Fall meetings (DPS, for example) last year; which is indeed great stuff..the Saturn dust streams originating from the tiger stripes of Enceledus, the E ring origins, and the surrounding plasma interactions is incredible. The gases and dust from the tiger stripes/hot spot were reported then by all of the Cassini teams.
Is the news from Carolyn Porco regarding water newer? I’m not sure, but the water, at least in a vapor form I heard about last Fall in the meetings.
March 9th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
Yeah, the plumes I think were known to have water. The issue is that the liquid water may be just below the surface.
March 10th, 2006 at 2:32 am
This is amazing and incredible!
I think that we shall soon find that water abounds everywhere and in abundance. I have had heated discussions about off Earth liquid water for some time, and here we are.
And…I still argue that Mars is not the freeze dried dead world that we were all taught it was while we were growing up. All in good time.
I wonder what happens to the water that is shot up from the geysers….doen it gently fall back down on the surface as fluffy freeze dried snow/ice crystals? And the book quote from 1988 is amazing! I wonder where in the hell he picked Enceladus to have liquid water. Now…do we know for sure and can positively say that the lakes on Titan are indeed just Methane?
This is exciting stuff and I always say…
“It’s a great time being an astronomer!”
March 10th, 2006 at 2:54 am
“Where does the heat come from to keep water in a liquid state? Enceladus is only about 500 km in diameter. Can there be volcanic activity on such a small body?”
From the super secret alien base under the South Pole of Enceladus!
March 10th, 2006 at 7:11 am
I’m not a fan of Drudge, but neither am I a fan of “press embargos”, so I’ll call it a draw and just hope that this spurs more exploration of these potentially lively areas in our Solar System.
March 10th, 2006 at 7:25 am
Life on Enceladus?
The big tease that wasn’t ( thanks to Matt Drudge ignoring posting protocol ), is that there is LIFE ON ENCELADUS! Well, that’s not exactly proven. There is apparently, very strong evidence of liquid water. See those plumes shooting off
March 10th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Press embargoes serve a useful purpose. You want the big Media Announcement to get the attention. So you hold off, don’t tell the press anything about what you’re doing, but call them to the meeting. Who shows up? *crickets* So you tell them a little something to get them interested, *boom* it’s all over the place ahead of the announcment and probably garbled. Now you’re scrambling to reduce the confusion rather than getting to state the true story first.
The press embargo means you can give the press early access to information so they can try to understand it and prepare questions, frame their stories, etc. But they don’t release that info until the Official announcement.
It’s the rules of doing business. You don’t like my press embargo, then I don’t give you the info early next time, and you get scooped by all the folks who do get it early and are just waiting to hit “send”.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Bad Albert said:
“Where does the heat come from to keep water in a liquid state? Enceladus is only about 500 km in diameter. Can there be volcanic activity on such a small body?”
Well, I can’t remember how close Enceladus is to Saturn, but it seems most likely to be heating as a result of tidal flexing caused by Saturn’s gravity.
March 10th, 2006 at 10:23 am
Prowler67 said:
“I heard about it this morning. Is it a real possibility to have lifeforms as big as a fish? I was under the impresion it would be more like microscopic life if any.”
Yes, if life were to exist in liquid water beneath the surface of Enceladus, it is far more likely to be microbial life than multicellular life. To use Earth as a comparison, it is currently estimated that microbial life existed on Earth for about three billion years or so before multicellular life evolved, and that multicellular life has been around for less than a billion years.
March 10th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Isn’t Drudge proof of alien life?
March 10th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
It appears the heat comes tides induced by the nearby moon Dione. Go to my “Misconceptions” page and I have an article about how tides can do this.
March 10th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Well I was surprised by the New York Times, front page article with photo of the Enceladus anouncement. Maybe, just maybe the general population and politicians will get the HINT that space SCIENCE can be cool stuff.
May 6th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
[...] a much better and detailed read on this, visit Bad Astronomy and Ciclops. Technorati Tags: cassini, enceladus, saturn, SETI, The Solar [...]
August 13th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Imagine that we can SEED Enceladus with life (simple bacteria, possibly some chemotrophs) if it turns out it is lifeless.
That would be a great mission!
August 13th, 2007 at 11:46 am
[...] is a NASA flagship (read: big, complicated, and very cool) mission to an outer satellite. Enceladus? [...]
May 14th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Kim: don’t you mean “opportunity cost” of drilling vs fishing?
May 14th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
i think we should drive under this new life form and prove our dominance in this region, then we can exploit it till its a husk of a moon and move outward and onward, until we become too spread thin and aliens resort to hurling planets at us (poor pluto). but seriously, add onion to the fish and some boullibaise.