DAN VERGANO, USA TODAY – Icy chasms on one of Saturn’s most humble

moons, hidden amid its glorious rings, have overtaken the sands of Mars

and the stratosphere of Venus as the most intriguing potential hiding

place for alien life in our solar system. Enceladus, a shining ball of

ice hugging Saturn’s rings, was first caught in the act of spewing a

watery geyser from its south pole two years ago by the international

Cassini mission. Water, life’s most crucial ingredient, was blasting 270

miles into space, actually hitting the orbiting spacecraft, from cracks

on the frozen moon dubbed “tiger stripes.”

Astronomers and astrobiologists, who are always looking for signs of

life far from Earth, were caught by surprise – and they remain so,

unable to explain how such a small celestial body (only 318 miles wide

at its equator ) can pump out so much water.

“Nobody has figured it out,” says Andrew Dombard of Johns Hopkins

University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. . .

Every eight seconds, the geyser spotted in a flyby of Enceladus in

December 2005 dumped about a ton of not just water but also a mixture of

life’s building blocks – organic compounds such as methane, propane,

acetylene and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen – into Saturn’s outer

“E” ring.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-07-22-saturn-enceladus-life_N.htm?csp=34