Saturn Content

Looking Inside Icy Moons

Andy Fell — November 24, 2025 - 10:43am

The outer planets of the Solar System are swarmed by ice-wrapped moons. Some of these, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, are known to have oceans of liquid water between the ice shell and the rocky core and could be the best places in our solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. A new study published Nov. 24 in Nature Astronomy sheds light on what could be going on beneath the surface of these worlds and provides insights into how their diverse geologic features may have formed.

On Icy Enceladus, Expansion Cracks Let Inner Ocean Boil Out

Andy Fell — March 23, 2022 - 4:30pm

In 2006, the Cassini spacecraft recorded geyser curtains shooting forth from “tiger stripe” fissures near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus — sometimes as much as 200 kilograms of water per second.

Explaining the Tiger Stripes of Enceladus

Andy Fell — December 09, 2019 - 11:53am

Saturn’s tiny, frozen moon Enceladus is a strange place. Just 300 miles across, the moon is thought to have an outer shell of ice covering a global ocean 20 miles deep, encasing a rocky core. Slashed across Enceladus’ south pole are four straight, parallel fissures or “tiger stripes” from which water erupts. These fissures aren’t quite like anything else in the solar system.

The winds of Titan

IET WebDev — December 08, 2014 - 12:00am

As sand dunes march across the Sahara, vast dunes cross the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. New research from a refurbished NASA wind tunnel reveals the physics of how particles move in Titan's methane-laden winds and could help to explain why Titan's dunes form in the way they do. The work is published online Dec. 8 in the journal Nature.