The Cassini spacecraft flew close to Saturn's small moon Enceladus three times in 2005. Cassini's UltraViolet Imaging Spectrograph observed stellar occultations on two flybys and confirmed the existence, composition, and regionally confined nature of a water vapor plume in the south polar region of Enceladus. This plume provides an adequate amount of water to resupply losses from Saturn's E ring and to be the dominant source of the neutral OH and atomic oxygen that fill the Saturnian system.

The Cassini spacecraft completed three close flybys of Saturn's enigmatic moon Enceladus between February and July 2005. On the third and closest flyby, on 14 July 2005, multiple Cassini instruments detected evidence for ongoing endogenic activity in a region centered on Enceladus' south pole. The polar region is the source of a plume of gas and dust, which probably emanates from prominent warm troughs seen on the surface. Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) detected 3 to 7 gigawatts of thermal emission from the south polar troughs at temperatures up to 145 kelvin or higher, making Enceladus only the third known solid planetary body-after Earth and Io-that is sufficiently geologically active for its internal heat to be detected by remote sensing. If the plume is generated by the sublimation of water ice and if the sublimation source is visible to CIRS, then sublimation temperatures of at least 180 kelvin are required.

No abstract

Spatially resolved infrared and ultraviolet wavelength spectra of Europa's leading, anti-jovian quadrant observed from the Galileo spacecraft show absorption features resulting from hydrogen peroxide. Comparisons with laboratory measurements indicate surface hydrogen peroxide concentrations of about 0.13 percent, by number, relative to water ice. The inferred abundance is consistent with radiolytic production of hydrogen peroxide by intense energetic particle bombardment and demonstrates that Europa's surface chemistry is dominated by radiolysis.

In this article, we summarize the work of the NASA Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG) Roadmaps to Ocean Worlds (ROW) group. The aim of this group is to assemble the scientific framework that will guide the exploration of ocean worlds, and to identify and prioritize science objectives for ocean worlds over the next several decades. The overarching goal of an Ocean Worlds exploration program as defined by ROW is to “identify ocean worlds, characterize their oceans, evaluate their habitability, search for life, and ultimately understand any life we find.” The ROW team supports the creation of an exploration program that studies the full spectrum of ocean worlds, that is, not just the exploration of known ocean worlds such as Europa but candidate ocean worlds such as Triton as well. The ROW team finds that the confirmed ocean worlds Enceladus, Titan, and Europa are the highest priority bodies to target in the near term to address ROW goals. Triton is the highest priority candidate ocean world to target in the near term. A major finding of this study is that, to map out a coherent Ocean Worlds Program, significant input is required from studies here on Earth; rigorous Research and Analysis studies are called for to enable some future ocean worlds missions to be thoughtfully planned and undertaken. A second finding is that progress needs to be made in the area of collaborations between Earth ocean scientists and extraterrestrial ocean scientists.

No abstract

1] Although of great interest for science and resource utilization, the Moon's permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) near each pole present difficult targets for remote sensing. The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission is able to map PSRs at far-ultraviolet (FUV) wavelengths using two faint sources of illumination from the night sky: the all-sky Ly a glow produced as interplanetary medium (IPM) H atoms scatter the Sun's Ly a emissions, and the much fainter source from UV-bright stars. The reflected light from these two sources produces only a few hundred events per second in the photon-counting LAMP instrument, so building maps with useful signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios requires the careful accumulation of the observations from thousands of individual LRO orbits. In this paper we present the first FUV albedo maps obtained by LAMP of the Moon's southern and northern polar regions. The results show that (1) most PSR regions are darker at all FUV wavelengths, consistent with their surface soils having much larger porosities than non-PSR regions (e.g., $70% compared to $40% or so), and (2) most PSRs are somewhat "redder" (i.e., more reflective at the longer FUV wavelengths) than non-PSR regions, consistent with the presence of $1-2% water frost at the surface. Citation: Gladstone, G. R., et al. (2012), Far-ultraviolet reflectance properties of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions,

[1] The Cassini Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) observed an occultation of the Sun by the water vapor plume at the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) spectrum is dominated by the spectral signature of H 2 O gas, with a nominal line-of-sight column density of 0.90 ± 0.23 × 10 16 cm −2 (upper limit of 1.0 × 10 16 cm −2 ). The upper limit for N 2 is 5 × 10 13 cm −2 , or <0.5% in the plume; the lack of N 2 has significant implications for models of the geochemistry in Enceladus' interior. The inferred rate of water vapor injection into Saturn's magnetosphere is ∼200 kg/s. The calculated values of H 2 O flux from three occultations observed by UVIS have a standard deviation of 30 kg/s (15%), providing no evidence for substantial short-term variability. Collimated gas jets are detected in the plume with Mach numbers of 5-8, implying vertical gas velocities that exceed 1000 m/sec. Observations at higher altitudes with the Cassini Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer indicate correlated structure in the plume. Our results support the subsurface liquid model, with gas escaping and being accelerated through nozzle-like channels to the surface, and are consistent with recent particle composition results from the Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer.