By Bill Andrews, Source: Discover Magazine

If you know anything about Enceladus, an icy moon in Saturn’s tow, it’s probably the amazing jets of water spurting off the satellite’s south pole. The image is one of the most stunning to come from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, orbiting within the Saturnian system for 10 years — not just because it looks cool, but because it showed that tiny Enceladus, just over 300 miles across, could harbor interesting activity.

Well that was just the start: new findings from Cassini indicate that Enceladus hosts a huge subsurface sea of liquid water beneath its south pole, possibly fueling those very jets.

Entering Enceladus

The Cassini probe is pretty impressive. Not only does it have your standard space cameras to capture pretty pictures and important information, but the probe itself can measure a world’s mass distribution. The subtle variations of mass pull on Cassini with slightly different gravitational strengths, so scientists can learn about a body’s internal structure just by seeing what the probe does.

Read the full article at: Discover Magazine