A moon of Saturn contains the first known habitable ocean in space

Need some new friends and a place where you can all play Marco Polo?

A salty ocean hidden beneath the surface of Enceladus, an Arizona-sized moon orbiting Saturn, is the only body of water beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed to create life, according to a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in Nature. And we’ll soon find out if any extraterrestrial life is present – right here in our very solar system.

🌕🌊 Let’s dive right in (heh): There are six elements that, along with water and energy, make up the building blocks of life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus.

But phosphorus is typically considered a “bottleneck” in the process of creating life, since it’s relatively rare in outer space. Not so on Enceladus, though, where phosphorus appears to be abundant.

• The moon, which measures 300 miles in diameter, contains a global subsurface ocean 30 miles below its icy surface. Over a 13-year period ending in 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft completed a half-dozen flybys of Enceladus to collect material ejected from its subsurface ocean by cryovolcanoes at the moon’s south pole.
• Previous analysis of that ejected material had found every building-block for life present in the ocean except for phosphorus. But now, for the first time, researchers have broken that bottle’s neck and documented its presence.

🐍👀 Looking ahead… Once it arrives on Enceladus sometime next decade, a NASA-designed 16-foot-long snake robot will slither its way down into the subsurface ocean to play Marco Polo, aka explore for signs of extraterrestrial life.