Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus is "absolutely" a highlight of the Cassini mission and should be targeted in future searches for life, Robert H. Brown of The University of Arizona, leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team, said last week.
Brown and other Cassini scientists attended a meeting in London last week and are at the 37th annual Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Cambridge University this week.
"Enceladus is without a doubt one of the most spectacular things Cassini has seen," Brown said in a phone interview Thursday. "It's one of the biggest puzzles. It'll be a long time before anyone comes up with a good explanation of how Enceladus does what it does, and for a scientist, that's pure, unmitigated fun. Solving the biggest puzzles is the thrilling part of doing science.
Read more here.
Over on James Nicoll's LJ, I joked that the most common life bearing world might be the ice encrusted moon rather than the terretrial world. Maybe I shouldn't joke. It might be true. Makes for an interesting change to the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox.
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