Space & Astronomy

Saturn's moon Enceladus may have tipped over

By T.K. Randall
May 31, 2017 ·  5 comments

Enceladus was once struck by a large asteroid. Image Credit: NASA/JPL Often regarded as one of the most promising places to look for signs of extraterrestrial life, Saturn's icy moon, which is thought to be home to a vast ocean of liquid water, may have once been struck by an asteroid with such extreme force that it ended up being tipped over on to its side.

Indications of this catastrophic impact were discovered recently by researchers who had been examining the data sent back by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.They found that the moon's spin axis ( the line through the north and south poles ) had reoriented and that Enceladus had seemingly tipped over from its original axis by as much as 55 degrees.

"We found a chain of low areas, or basins, that trace a belt across the moon's surface that we believe are the fossil remnants of an earlier, previous equator and poles," said Radwan Tajeddine, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University.

"The geological activity in this terrain is unlikely to have been initiated by internal processes. We think that, in order to drive such a large reorientation of the moon, it's possible that an impact was behind the formation of this anomalous terrain."

Source: Deccan Chronicle | Comments (5)

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