However, a narrow focus on biosignatures in the case of Enceladus would carry significant scientific risk because it presupposes an origin of life in the subsurface ocean. This assumption is unsupported because we do not know where or how life originated on Earth, or how likely it is for ...
New research suggests there are locations on the surface of Saturn's moon, Enceladus, where spacecraft could land to scoop up pristine traces of the key ingredients for life. It's believed that these biosignatures come from subsurface oceans within the world's icy shell. ...
Existing interpretations of plume vapour and particulates, sampled via the Cassini spacecraft, hint at an ocean conducive for life9, with possible submarine hydrothermal activity at the ocean bottom10,11, perhaps fuelled by tidal heating in Enceladus’ rocky core12. Combined with detected CHNOP bio...
Continetti and several colleague have now tested the device in a laboratory, showing that amino acids transported in ice plumes — like at Enceladus — can survive impact speeds of up to 4.2 km/s. Their research ispublished in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Thi...
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Hence, the payload for melting probes and submersibles must be chosen according to the dedicated science goal of finding extant or past biosignatures. The design of adequate instrumentation for the envisioned probes should consequently be guided, first, by ongoing exploration of extreme environments on...
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Exoplanets are part of the picture as well. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is due to launch in 2021, will be able to sniff the atmospheres of nearby alien worlds for potential biosignatures, as will three giant ground-based observatories scheduled to come online in the middle to ...
Phosphorus, the least abundant of the essential elements necessary for biological processes, hadn’t been detected until now. The element is a building block forDNA, which forms chromosomes and carries genetic information, and is present in the bones of mammals, cell membranes, and ocean-dwell...
11and3’). All signatures with possible major contributions from inorganic species are colour-shaded as in Fig.1. Signatures not marked are exclusively or mostly due to organic cations. The abundance and position of the HMOC species is relatively independent of the impact speed of the ice grain...