Feb 25,
2008
Impending Enceladus
Encounter
Cassini is about to
make one of the closest approaches by a space vehicle to any
moon in the Solar System. What are the expectations?
On March 12, 2008, the Cassini space probe will fly over the south pole of
Saturn’s moon Enceladus at a distance of 30 kilometers from the surface,
whereupon it will accelerate and move up to a distance of 120 kilometers. Its
primary mission is to analyze the plumes of vapor that rise from so-called “tiger
stripe” cracks that dominate the southern hemisphere, feeding a constant
stream of ions into the plasmasphere of its giant parent.
In a June 13, 2007
European Space Agency release it was announced that two other moons of
Saturn, Tethys and Dione, are “flinging great streams of particles into space.”
The
Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) made the discovery when data from Saturn
revealed that a torus of charged particles surrounds the planet, trapped within
its magnetic field. So far, three moons have demonstrated connections with a
vast electric field that links them to Saturn. We predict that other moons
within the Saturnian system will reveal similar galvanic coupling as more data
is received.
When the Cassini spacecraft
began its investigation of Saturn’s moons, NASA scientists noticed that
Saturn's magnetic field bends around Enceladus. But their misunderstanding
of plasma behavior led them to insist that the effect is mechanical and not
electrical, since electric currents in space "don't do anything."
An abstract found in the prestigious journal Nature confirms the
prevailing attitude:
“…we show that the most likely explanation for the heat and vapour production is
shear heating by tidally driven lateral (strike-slip) fault motion with
displacement of 0.5 m over a tidal period. Vapour produced by this heating may
escape as plumes through cracks reopened by the tidal stresses. The ice shell
thickness needed to produce the observed heat flux is at least 5 km. The tidal
displacements required imply a Love number of h2 > 0.01, suggesting that the ice
shell is decoupled from the silicate interior by a subsurface ocean.”
A similar interpretation of the “geysers” can be found in the
February 12, 2008 issue of Astronomy Magazine where JPL scientists
theorize that “pinball physics” is the best way to explain how water and ice
erupt from Saturn’s sixth largest moon. As the article states: “Shooting up
through crooked cracks in the ice, the particles ricochet off the walls, losing
speed, while the water vapor moves unimpeded up the crevasse. The vapor reboosts
the frozen particles as they pinball off the walls, carrying them upward.”
So it is internally generated heat from “tidal friction” and “ricocheting”
molecules of water producing temperatures in excess of 275 Kelvin that account
for the plumes of Enceladus.
From the perspective of an Electric Universe, no explanation will be sufficient
until it is acknowledged that the polar hot spots on Enceladus are due to a
continuous flow of electric current into the moon. Hot poles are found in places
where no conventional astrophysicist ever expected to find them: Jupiter, Saturn
and Neptune all possess anomalous heat signatures emanating from their vertices
when, according to conventional understanding, they should be among the coldest
places in the Solar System.
In a
previous Thunderbolts Picture of the Day we referred to a statement by EU
theorist and author Wal Thornhill: “…if NASA will look they will find that the
jets [vapor plumes] move across the surface. And in their motion
across the surface, the electric arcs that produce the jets are creating the
observed channels as they excavate material from the surface and accelerate it
into space.”
With these facts in mind, what can Cassini expect to encounter when it flies
through the hypothermic effluvium escaping from the moon? An ice fragment no
larger than a grain of salt could injure the spacecraft if it impacted a
super-cooled detector or a vital connection with its power source. Using the
Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS), the NASA team interpreted the
amount of starlight absorbed by the vapor plumes in the area of greatest density
and determined that they are a thousand times less dense than those that could
cause damage, so there should be no concerns.
Cassini has been
in orbit around Saturn since July 1, 2004. As it made its
way into the electrically active environment of the
monstrous gas giant it slowly equalized its charge potential
with that of Saturn and its surroundings. It can be expected
that it is now at equilibrium with the ionized potential of
the system so there should be no arcing between the
spacecraft and Enceladus as it passes through the rarified
vapor that is being drawn upward from the moon’s fractured
pole. There is the remote possibility that Cassini will make
contact with a Birkeland current filament that is excavating
material out of the moon, but the coincidence would be
surprising.
For all intents and purposes, there will be no effect on
Cassini when it encounters Enceladus at its closest
approach.
“The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally
received with distrust.”
--- Arthur Schopenhauer
By Stephen Smith
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