Some days ago, the Cassini space probe completed its last Enceladus flyby. It’s a Saturn’s moon very interesting for the presence of an underground ocean of liquid water. This time, Cassini passed about 5,000 kilometers (about 3,100 miles) from Enceladus measuring the heat flow from inside it and taking more pictures of its icy surface.

Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL, expressed feelings of both sadness and triumph on the occasion of this event. The Cassini spacecraft will keep on studying Saturn and its moons until September 2017 but it will not pass as close to Enceladus anymore. The planet and its rings and moons are very interesting scientific objectives but Enceladus proved to be one of the great treasures of the solar system.

During the Cassini mission, 22 Enceladus flybys were carried out because the space probe uncovered geological activity beneath its surface shortly after its arrival in 2005. A decade of investigation identified in this moon one of the best candidates to host life forms in the solar system. It’s an issue that will keep on being discussed and will be further investigated in some way.

For these reasons, this flyby was the culmination of a decade of extraordinary scientific investigation with findings that alone made Cassini mission very successful. However, it’s inevitable that for the people who work for the mission the end of these close studies is also sad but the spacecraft’s fuel is limited and what remains is to be fully exploited to study the rest of Saturn’s system.

In one of the previous flybys, the Cassini space probe showed stark contrasts in the landscape of Enceladus north pole. Again in recent days it took photographs of the area, where you can see a region dotted with craters (on the right in the picture) close to another that instead is lacking them (on the left) and for this reason is presumably younger.

These photographs add up to the huge amount taken over the years by the Cassini space probe. Together with the measurements on the heat flow from inside Enceladus they’ll be examined by scientists together with the data collected in the past to try to understand the geological processes taking place on this moon. This will also help to understand the chemical processes taking place in the underground ocean hoping to find out if there are any life forms.

[ad name=”AmazonScience”]