The European Space Agency (ESA) has set its sights on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus by announcing a new Voyage 2050 mission.
Between 2005 and 2015, NASA’s Cassini probe made several flybys of Enceladus. During those close approaches, the spacecraft captured images of water ice plumes erupting from the moon’s south pole.
These have long intrigued scientists, as they indicate the icy moon could be home to a vast subsurface ocean that may harbor microbial extraterrestrial life.
Now, ESA has revealed that it aims to send a spacecraft to investigate the moon further. The mission will form a part of Voyager 2050, ESA’s long-term science activities program.
ESA officials made the announcement at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) and Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) joint meeting, held in Helsinki earlier this month.
Europe’s long-term Enceladus plans
The new mission will require an orbiter and a lander to analyze Enceladus comprehensively. Interestingly, though, the orbiter won’t wait passively for data to be beamed from the icy moon’s surface. Instead, it will actively collect, sample, and analyze material from the moon’s water ice plumes.
These plumes are known to eject their material thousands of miles from the moon’s surface. In 2023, for example, the James Webb Space Telescope observed a plume stretching over 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) into space.
At the EPSC-DPS, Jörn Helbert of ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) announced that an ESA study team has been working to identify key scientific and technological requirements since March.
Though the mission won’t fly until the 2040s, an early outline calls for two launches of the largest variant of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. Though subject to change, the mission is tentatively scheduled for launch in 2042.
According to a Space.com report, the spacecraft would take just over ten years to reach Enceladus, arriving in 2053. The lander would then touchdown on the moon’s surface, following several flybys, around 2058.
Searching for life in our solar system
A key reason ESA is focusing on Enceladus is the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life in our solar system. According to Helbert, Enceladus meets three key criteria for supporting life: Liquid water, the necessary chemical elements, and energy from the Sun.
In 2021, a team of scientists claimed the amount of methane emanating from Enceladus’ plumes raises the possibility that life exists in the moon’s subsurface ocean.
According to the scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy, no known lifeless process could be responsible for the amount of methane they observed firing out of the moon’s southern ice cracks, also known as “tiger stripes”.
The complexity of analyzing subsurface oceans on icy moons means it may take decades to prove whether life exists in our solar system.
Still, missions to Enceladus and other candidates like Jupiter’s Europa have the potential to alter our understanding of the universe completely. The discovery of microbial life in our cosmic neighborhood would drastically raise the probability that intelligent alien life exists beyond our solar system.