Episode 140: Revealing Enceladus's Secrets

Guest: Lucas Fifer We've given Europa a lot of attention this year, but Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, is also one of the most intriguing places to seek out new life in our solar system. On this episode of Strange New Worlds, we learn all about Enceladus's subsurface ocean, as revealed by NASA's Cassini orbiter and a new computer model developed by planetary scientist and astrobiologist Lucas Fifer. Is Enceladus's ocean habitable? What's the best strategy for looking for biosignatures? And what would it mean to find life out there? Lucas's paper, "Chemical Fractionation Modeling of Plumes Indicates a Gas-rich, Moderately Alkaline Enceladus Ocean": https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac7a9f Follow us on Twitter! Strange New Worlds: https://twitter.com/miquai Mike: https://twitter.com/scienceoftrek Lucas: https://twitter.com/fifebeyondearth