Abstract
The Case for an Orbital Mission to Characterize the Organic Content of the Enceladus Plumes
Highlights
3. Advancing our knowledge about the identity and concentration of organic molecules in the Enceladus plume will advance our knowledge of the boundaries of habitability and life in our solar system and will compliment and facilitate more detailed landed missions to the icy moons
Follow the water is a great guide in this quest but so far we have not looked where we know there is or was recently liquid water in an environment presently conducive to habitability and to life
Nature and Cassini have conspired to provide us with a very obvious opportunity to sample a liquid ocean at Enceladus without many of the issues of planetary protection and special regions
Summary
3. Advancing our knowledge about the identity and concentration of organic molecules in the Enceladus plume will advance our knowledge of the boundaries of habitability and life in our solar system and will compliment and facilitate more detailed landed missions to the icy moons. That we know the plumes are there and that we have some knowledge of their organic content, there is much to be learned about habitability and life by sending a focused plume characterization and high sensitivity organic detection suite of instruments to Enceladus analogous to the proposed ELF mission (Reh et al, 2016).
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