DAN VERGANO, USA TODAY – Icy chasms on one of Saturn’s most humble<\/p>\n
moons, hidden amid its glorious rings, have overtaken the sands of Mars<\/p>\n
and the stratosphere of Venus as the most intriguing potential hiding<\/p>\n
place for alien life in our solar system. Enceladus, a shining ball of<\/p>\n
ice hugging Saturn’s rings, was first caught in the act of spewing a<\/p>\n
watery geyser from its south pole two years ago by the international<\/p>\n
Cassini mission. Water, life’s most crucial ingredient, was blasting 270<\/p>\n
miles into space, actually hitting the orbiting spacecraft, from cracks<\/p>\n
on the frozen moon dubbed “tiger stripes.”<\/p>\n
Astronomers and astrobiologists, who are always looking for signs of<\/p>\n
life far from Earth, were caught by surprise – and they remain so,<\/p>\n
unable to explain how such a small celestial body (only 318 miles wide<\/p>\n
at its equator ) can pump out so much water.<\/p>\n
“Nobody has figured it out,” says Andrew Dombard of Johns Hopkins<\/p>\n
University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. . .<\/p>\n
Every eight seconds, the geyser spotted in a flyby of Enceladus in<\/p>\n
December 2005 dumped about a ton of not just water but also a mixture of<\/p>\n
life’s building blocks – organic compounds such as methane, propane,<\/p>\n
acetylene and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen – into Saturn’s outer<\/p>\n
“E” ring.<\/p>\n