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The Saturnian moon Enceladus
may be one of the most enigmatic
bodies in the solar system.
For nearly a decade since the first
close flyby of the Cassini space probe,
NASA scientists have faced
a series of puzzles
that continue to challenge
conventional theory.
The electrical nature of these puzzling
phenomena has grown increasingly evident
leading to the 2012 NASA report,
Enceladus' plume is a new
kind of plasma laboratory.
In part one of this two-part
presentation we explore the question,
what makes Enceladus such a unique and
fascinating case study in planetary science?
Enceladus is a moon of Saturn,
orbits just outside the Rings.
It has one of the most perfect orbits
of any moon in the solar system.
It's almost a perfect circle.
One of its faces always points towards
Saturn as it moves around in its orbit.
It's almost perfectly aligned in
the equatorial plane of Saturn.
And what all that means is that the gravity
forces acting on it are almost zero.
It's almost as if it
were sitting still.
Because all the variations caused by an
eccentric orbit or an inclined orbit
or a rotation other than
synchronous, have been zeroed out.
So Enceladus makes an almost
perfect laboratory in space.
Saturn only receives 1% of the
sunlight that the Earth gets.
Enceladus in turn, is the most
reflective object in the solar system
so of that 1% of the
light the Earth gets,
less than 1% of that even
can heat that little moon.
So it isn't being
heated by the Sun
so that can't be much of a factor for
the things we see on this little moon.
Since 2005, NASA
scientists have known
that Enceladus emits unexpected
jets of icy material.
Adding further surprise, the jets
were found near the South Pole,
which NASA scientists had expected
to be the moon's coldest region
but which instead turned
out to be its warmest.
"This is as astonishing as
if we'd flown past Earth
and found that Antarctica was
warmer than the Sahara..."
Adding further astonishment, in 2009 Cassini
scientists discovered the presence
of electrically charged particles
in the Enceladus' plumes.
"The spectrometer on Cassini,
the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer
(CAPS) discovered a surprise:
the ice particles are
electrically charged."
What can these jets tell us about the obvious
electrical environment of Enceladus?
One of the features of Enceladus
that is so intriguing,
are these jets we see
coming off of it.
They were first
discovered back in 2005,
when Cassini arrived at Saturn and
began looking at the different moons.
They didn't announce
it until November 2005,
because they weren't really
sure what they were seeing.
But by now, it's become perfectly clear that
jets of finely divided water particles
are coming off of this
moon almost continuously
and the main area they come
from is the southern region
where there are these four parallel
bands called 'tiger stripes'
over a hundred kilometers long
and separated from each other
by several tens of kilometers
and slightly discolored.
And they call them
geysers or cryovolcanoes
because they cannot imagine any other
mechanism that would produce such a feature.
But because Enceladus is
so perfect in its orbit,
and there's no heat
sources coming into it,
and there's not enough energy
from cosmic rays to power it,
the only source of energy for
these geysers, as they call them,
would have to come from
within Enceladus itself.
But this little moon is only
about 300 miles across.
It's a small little ball of ice,
out in the middle of nowhere.
Its surface temperature is lower
than the boiling point of nitrogen.
It's about 72 degrees
above absolute zero.
And so the water ice that composes
at least its outer layers,
would be as hard as steel and colder
than anything we would care to touch.
So anything that would
heat up inside of it,
the ice would want to
conduct that heat away
before it could ever get
more than a few degrees
above the boiling point
of liquid nitrogen.
So the heat conduction problem is one
of many problems with the geyser theory.
But another problem
is that, if it were
water being heated up and
launched off of Enceladus,
that's actually a description
of how a rocket engine works.
So if Enceladus has geysers, then Enceladus
has its own onboard rocket engines.
And those rocket engines, no
matter how tiny their thrust,
would be moving it in its orbit.
It would be distorting it in some
fashion. Either in eccentricity,
which is nearly circular,
or in inclination,
or in major axis,
either making it come closer
to Saturn or move further away.
And we don't see any
of that happening.
And if it were a heat source now, it
would have been a bigger heat source
in the past. If it was
radioactive or chemical.
And so these rocket engines would
have been even more powerful.
And so the idea that Enceladus could end
up in this perfectly circular orbit,
is statistically just
about impossible.
These engines firing off more
or less in random directions,
would be doing something
to disturb that orbit.
So they're really at a loss to
explain how an internal heat source
could be causing these jets
to be escaping from Enceladus
and not disturbing its orbit.
It's a series of
scientific problems.
A chain that's, with every link,
is very, very speculative and weak.
And that's why we, in the Electric Universe,
don't think these are geysers at all.
In 2011, NASA scientists
found that the heat output
in Enceladus's
south polar region,
is more than an order of magnitude
higher than their models had predicted.
"The mechanism capable of producing the
much higher observed internal power
remains a mystery and
challenges the currently
proposed models of long-term
heat production."
NASA scientists recently
determined by calculation
that the power levels involved, are
something like around 15 gigawatts.
That would be like about, oh, at
least a dozen nuclear power plants
worth of power being generated in
these jets coming off of Enceladus.
Well that's quite a bit of power for a moon
that has no evident external heat source
and appears to be composed of ice at
the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
So where could such power
be coming from?
Well, if such power is
coming from within
and if such power is
generated radioactively,
which is what their
main theory is,
that means that inside Enceladus are
more than one dozen nuclear power plants
worth of radioactive decay.
We haven't even found
such a thing on Earth.
So either the power of these jets
is coming from within Enceladus
or it is being supplied
from elsewhere.
This little moon is orbiting
Saturn in its magnetic field
which is in turn being fed by power,
either coming toward the Sun
or power coming, electric
power coming from the Sun.
More likely, Saturn is acting as a cathode
in the overall heliocentric circuit
that powers the Sun.
It seems to be intercepting
part of that.
And in turn, Enceladus is intercepting
some tiny, tiny fraction of that.
In fact, we have a number, 15 gigawatts.
At least for the tiger-stripe area.
The power levels involved
in the solar circuit
are far more than needed to explain
the features on this little moon.
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