Alex McColgan

In 2017, amateur astronomer Ted Strike looked back at old Voyager images of Enceladus and found a feature that could have changed the course of the original Cassini mission.

A water plume.

Can you spot it?

If we had known about it when the mission was in planning, how different might the design of Cassini been?

Well, whatever changes scientists and engineers might have made, they now have a chance to be realized as new missions are being planned to continue the work of Cassini.

The European Space Agency is racing forward with a mission set to launch in 2042, to arrive at Saturn in 2053 with a potential landing on Enceladus in 2058.

We already know Enceladus has all the conditions to kickstart life, so it's exciting to think, what will we be able to find when we look below the ice?

Fortunately, we won't have to wait quite that long to get some answers on life on icy moons generally.

Another ESA mission called JUICE, or Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, is already on its way and expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2031 to study Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede.

Its mission purpose is to investigate the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants.

Two other proposed missions will explore Saturn's moons in new ways.

The Dragonfly mission to Titan will take advantage of the thick nitrogen atmosphere and use a drone for the first time on a natural satellite.

Outside of the national space agencies, a privately funded mission called Breakthrough Enceladus is also planned, though currently this project appears to be dormant.

But, the mission I'm most excited about is the Enceladus Explorer, a project funded by the German Aerospace Centre that proposes to send a nuclear ice mole – yes, you heard that correctly – to melt its way deep into the crust and expose untouched niches within the ice to search for life.

If any of these even hint that proto-life processes are active on an object outside the usual habitable zone, we will have opened up a whole new realm of possible places life could take hold across the galaxy.

Maybe life isn't rare after all.

I'm always reminded of a fantastic line from Jeremy England.

You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine a light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.

Perhaps scientists didn't see those plumes on the original Voyager images because they simply weren't expecting to see them.

But now that we know what we're looking for, there is no doubt more discoveries are on the way.