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Briny Breath of Enceladus
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Linda Spilker, Cassini Deputy Project Scientist - Recently, Cassini has found that a tiny moon that orbits around Saturn has jets and plumes of water coming out of it. 
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These particles go out and they form the E ring and in flying through the E ring one of the instruments on Cassini, 
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the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, can take those particles and get a composition, and as part of that, they see salt. 
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Text: SALT NaCl
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Sascha Kempf, Cassini Scientist: This is salt and this is what we found in the ice particles detected in Saturn's E ring.
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And what we think is that the salts come from an ocean below the surface of the moon Enceladus. 
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The sodium is a tracer for a subsurface ocean. 
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That the material of the ice particles is a kind of water like on Earth.
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Linda Spilker: And that that salty ocean tells us something about what might be going on inside of Enceladus to create the jets and plumes, 
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that you need water, liquid water in contact with a rocky core to get out the sodium.
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You could sort of think maybe the plumes are maybe sort of the breath of Enceladus, you know, coming out and telling us something about its interior.
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Sascha Kempf: So what we can say is we have the reservoir of liquid water and liquid water is one of the preconditions for forming life. 
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Text: Places known or believed to have liquid water layers include: Europa Ganymede Callisto Titan Enceladus Earth
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Linda Spilker: I was surprised and also very excited to find out that you know we're getting closer and closer to the conclusion that you have liquid water, 
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possibly a liquid ocean on a moon that's so tiny and in a place where we didn't expect to find conditions where you might find life.
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This tiny moon, just 300 miles across, that might have liquid water and the conditions, the precursors for life. 
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The focus as Cassini continues into its Equinox mission and continues on into the future will be to have more close flybys of Enceladus, to fly through that plume, 
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fly close to this tiny moon, to learn more about the processes going on inside.
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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
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