THE Cassini spacecraft has finally located the geysers on the moon Enceladus that are spewing water, ice and organic molecules into Saturn’s ring system.
The spacecraft snapped seven close-up images on 11 August during a fly-by 50 kilometres from Enceladus’s surface. After stitching these images together, astronomers pinpointed the vents by matching the resulting patchwork to a map of hotspots made in 2007 using Cassini’s infrared camera.
The vents turn out to be near a set of 300-metre-deep fractures nicknamed “tiger stripes”, and the images suggest the position of the vents has changed over time. “The eruptions have clearly moved…
