Alex McColgan

Would life have had enough time to emerge on Enceladus?

Although Cassini was at Saturn for 13 years, that was, of course, too short a time to be conclusive.

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope.

A team led by Dr. Jeronimo Villanueva used 10 hours of the James Webb's time to check in on Enceladus, and what they saw was shocking.

The moon had an even more enormous plume erupting from its south pole, expanding to 20 times the size of the moon itself, that is significantly larger than what Cassini saw.

These observations widened the known window of Enceladus' activity, and they solved another massive mystery.

Where does Saturn's atmospheric water come from?

The images show that Enceladus feeds a large torus of ice particles around Saturn, making it the only moon in the solar system that affects the atmospheric chemistry of its host planet.

But these water-ice particles also have another impact on the planet.

As they travel through the Saturn system, they're stripped of electrons, becoming ionized.

This then creates an electrically charged plasma, which scientists have recently discovered interacts with the planet's magnetic field.

Plasma waves 504,000 km long, that's 1,000 times the moon's diameter, known as the Alphen wings, stream from the moon.

The main ones go from Enceladus to the planet, but others are reflected back, creating an intriguing lattice of plasma around Saturn.

We still don't fully understand them, but they're a surprising consequence of Enceladus' great geysers.

But how long will this activity last?

Within the last year, decade-old data from the Cassini composite infrared spectrometer was compared to models of Enceladus' surface temperature.

The team, comprising Georgina Miles and Carly Howitt, were able to show that the total thermal output from the surface is very well matched with the predicted heat generation in the core.

This suggests the Moon's current ocean epoch will be long-lived, and that it is exactly what life needs to emerge.

It is incredible how much more has been learned simply from reanalyzing old Cassini data with new techniques.

And it's not just the professionals who are making discoveries.