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Ocean worlds in the productive asymmetry of cyclical motion in the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn

December 20, 2020
Ganymede-moon via NASA

Saturn’s ocean moon, Enceladus: Enough heat to power interior hydrothermal activity for billions of years, generated through tidal friction, if the moon has a highly porous core, a new study finds.” The moon is a potentially habitable world.

Enceladus via NASA
Enceladus via NASA

“This includes a global salty ocean below an ice shell… Jets of water vapour and icy grains are launched through fissures in the ice. The composition of the ejected material measured by Cassini included salts and silica dust, suggesting they form through hot water – at least 90ºC – interacting with rock in the porous core.

“The efficient rock–water interactions in a porous core massaged by tidal friction could generate up to 30 GW of heat,” for tens of millions to billions of years.

“‘Future missions capable of analysing the organic molecules in the Enceladus plume with a higher accuracy than Cassini would be able to tell us if sustained hydrothermal conditions could have allowed life to emerge,’ says Nicolas Altobelli, ESA’s Cassini project scientist…

“’We’ll be flying next-generation instruments … to Jupiter’s ocean moons [Ganymede, Callisto and Europa] … with ESA’s Juice mission, which is specifically tasked with trying to understand the potential habitability of ocean worlds in the outer Solar System,’ adds Nicolas.”

Source: Heating ocean moon Enceladus for billions of years

JUICE – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – is the first large-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2029, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.

How and why the absence of absolute symmetry in nature allows for the multifarious creation of worlds is explained with the logic of asymmetry developed in Unicycle, the Book of Fictitious Symmetry and Non-Random Truth.

Into the solstice once more!

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