“The conditions we mimicked in the lab are as close as possible to those inferred from Cassini on Enceladus,” says Simon Rittmann at the University of Vienna in Austria, who led the investigations.

Life on the seafloor

“There, you have contact with rock and minerals, pressures of around 50 atmospheres and temperatures most likely a bit higher than 0 degrees Celsius,” says Rittmann.

“This [team] has taken the first step to showing experimentally that methanogens can indeed live in the conditions expected on Enceladus,” says Chris McKay at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

“The way the jets react so responsively to changing stresses on Enceladus suggests they have their origins in a large body of liquid water,” Christophe Sotin co-author and Cassini team member said in the NASA release. “Liquid water was key to the development of life on Earth, so these discoveries whet the appetite to know whether life exists everywhere water is present” (pun, probably, intended).

“Although we can’t detect life, we’ve found that there’s a food source there for it. It would be like a candy store for microbes,” said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Cassini study.

In a statement, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington, succinctly summarized the significance of the find: “This is the closest we’ve come, so far, to identifying a place with some of the ingredients needed for a habitable environment. These results demonstrate the interconnected nature of NASA’s science missions that are getting us closer to answering whether we are indeed alone or not.”

Ladies and gentlemen, hold my coffee while I drool over this mind-bending image of Saturn—revealing waves of clouds swirling high above the planet. The image was snapped by the Cassini spacecraft at an altitude of 750,000 miles.

“Neighboring bands of clouds move at different speeds and directions depending on their latitudes. This generates turbulence where bands meet and leads to the wavy structure along the interfaces. Saturn’s upper atmosphere generates the faint haze seen along the limb of the planet in this image,” wrote NASA in a report.

“We have a lot of work to do to understand how they are getting in there,” Planetary scientist Mark Perry of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory explains. “None of the models predict this.”

“What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? We’ve been tracking it almost ever since,” Murray says. “We’ve never actually resolved the object. All we can do is track the glitch.”

Saturn approaching its northern summer

Saturn’s rings

Enceladus and its geysers

Titan

Saturn’s polar hexagon

Saturn’s Rose

Daphnis makes waves

Titan, Dione, and Saturn’s rings

Backlit Saturn

Earth from Saturn

“Resulting from the same process that creates spiral galaxies, spiral density waves in Saturn’s rings are much more tightly wound,” NASA wrote. “In this case, every second wave crest is actually the same spiral arm which has encircled the entire planet multiple times.”

And as a final comparison, you can see the two color photos together. Cassini’s joy ride across the universe is set to come to an end on September 15, which just so happens to be when Samsung release the Galaxy Note 8. Coincidence?

“The entirety of the main rings can be seen here, but due to the low viewing angle, the rings appear extremely foreshortened. The perspective shifts from the sunlit side of the rings to the unlit side, where sunlight filters through. On the sunlit side, the grayish C ring looks larger in the foreground because it is closer; beyond it is the bright B ring and slightly less-bright A ring, with the Cassini Division between them. The F ring is also fairly easy to make out.” the Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes in a post.