Saturn Moon Enceladus Rolled Over
Saturn's moon Enceladus - an active, icy world with an
unusually warm south pole - may have performed an unusual
trick for a planetary body: It may have rolled over.
Enceladus recently grabbed scientists' attention when the
Cassini spacecraft observed icy jets and plumes indicating
active geysers spewing from the tiny moon's south polar
region.
"The mystery we set out to explain was how the hot spot
could end up at the pole if it didn't start there," said
lead researcher Francis Nimmo of the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
Reporting in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature,
Nimmo's team proposes that the reorientation was driven by
warm, low-density material rising to the surface from
within Enceladus. A similar process may have happened on
Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus, they said.
"It's astounding that Cassini found a region of current
geological activity on an icy moon that we would expect to
be frigidly cold, especially down at this moon's
equivalent of Antarctica," said Robert Pappalardo,
co-author and planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. "We think the moon rolled over to put a deeply
seated warm, active area there."
http://www.saturndaily.com/reports/Saturn_Moon_Enceladus_Rolled_Over.html


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