Scientist for a Day Option 1: Enceladus
| Credit | NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech |
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Hi, Everyone! My name's Morgan. My favorite topic is Enceladus.
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Transcript
Host: Morgan Cable
Hi, Everyone! My name's Morgan.
I'm a research scientist specializing in astrobiology.
My job is to learn about planets and moons and find out whether
or not life could exist there.
My favorite topic is Enceladus.
Enceladus has a young, bright, icy surface, with a liquid water ocean underneath. Enceladus is about a billion miles away from the Sun, so it only gets about one percent as much sunlight as Earth gets.
It's very, very cold there, and yet there is liquid water beneath the surface.
I love Enceladus because this little moon of Saturn has ice geysers at its south pole. These geysers are spewing out ice into space. They're creating one of Saturn's rings as Enceladus orbits around the planet.
On Earth, wherever we find water, we find life.
We know there's water underneath the surface of Enceladus, and we know there's a source of energy driving those geysers.
In 2015, the Cassini spacecraft flew through Enceladus' geysers to see what they were made of.
We would love to send another mission back to Enceladus to see if there could be life there.
Wouldn't that be exciting?
Good luck, and have fun writing your essay!