"Water Vapor Jet from Saturn's Moon Enceladus Sparks Discovery of Saturn System's Water Supply"

A jet of water vapor from Saturn’s moon Enceladus more than 9,600 kilometers long (for a better idea, that’s the length of Eurasia from Ireland to Japan) was spotted by researchers analyzing data from the US-European-Canadian space observatory, the James Webb Telescope. Not only is this the first time such an outpouring has been observed at such a distance, but measurements from JWST have offered scientists for the first time a direct look at how this phenomenon supplies water to the entire Saturn system and its rings. Enceladus is an oceanic world that is barely four percent the size of Earth (its diameter reaches 505 kilometers). But for scientists, this moon represents one of the most interesting objects in our entire system when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life. Between the ice shell and the stone mantle is a global reservoir of salt water. The local volcanoes spew ice particles, water vapor and organic matter from fissures on the surface, which are unofficially nicknamed tiger stripes, like terrestrial geysers.

Until now, observatories have mapped jets from the surface of Enceladus several hundred kilometers long. However, the extraordinary sensitivity of the Webb telescope reveals a completely new story in this direction. The length of the jet is not the only parameter that has interested scientists. The intensity with which the water gushed from the surface reached the level of 300 liters per second according to the available flow measurements, which is also a particularly interesting figure. As she adds herself NASA, at this rate you would drain an Olympic swimming pool in a few hours. The agency also does not forget to add that if you were to use a garden hose for this activity, then it would take you more than 2 weeks.

Thanks to the James Webb Telescope, scientists were able to determine how much water ejected from the surface of Enceladus remains in the torus around the moon’s orbit using measurements from the onboard NIRSpec spectrometer.
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But back from swimming pools and gardening to cosmonautics. The American-European-Italian Cassini mission has spent more than a decade studying the Saturnian system. Not only did she manage to photograph jets from Enceladus, but she also flew directly through one such jet to perform its chemical analysis. The Cassini probe mission provided invaluable information thanks to its presence directly in the Saturn system, but the Webb telescope does not want to be embarrassed either. Thanks to its strategic location at the L2 libration point of the Sun-Earth system at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from our planet, together with the extraordinary sensitivity of its Integral Field Unit, which is part of the NIRSpec infrared spectrometer, it offers a completely new context.

Webb telescope observations directly show how jets of material from Enceladus feed water and other substances to the smeared torus (a shape resembling an American donut – donut) located near Saturn’s E ring. By analyzing data from the Webb telescope, astronomers were able to determine that approximately 30 percent of this the ejected water remains in this torus, while the other 70 percent escapes, supplying the rest of Saturn’s system with water. In the coming years, the James Webb Telescope will serve as the primary instrument for observing the oceanic moon Enceladus, and discoveries made from it will help prepare future unmanned probes that will, for example, search the depths of the subsurface oceans, determine how thick the ice crust is in various places, and many other things.

This James Webb Telescope observation of the moon Enceladus was made as part of the program 1250, which falls under the reserved observation time. The original purpose of this program was to demonstrate the capabilities of the James Webb Telescope in one particular field of science and thus prepare the conditions for future scientific studies. The team wrote down the results of the observations in the form of a scientific article, which was published on May 17 accepted for publication in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.

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