Dust Analyzer News Today

As a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who studies ice grains from Enceladus, I’m interested in whether there is life on this or other icy moons. I also want to understand how scientists like me could detect it.

Saturn has 146 confirmed moons – more than any other planet in the Solar System – but one called Enceladus stands out.

This fall, NASA partnered with the Open University in the U.K., the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Leipzig in Germany to launch a space orbiter to Europa,

If life exists on moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter, instruments headed there in the fall may just need a tiny ice grain to find it.

Thanks to mass spectrometers, space probes should be able to detect cellular material on individual ice grains.

Signs of life detectable in single ice grains emitted from moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter

Icy moons like Europa and Enceladus are exciting venues for the prospect of life beyond Earth

A single icy moon grain could host tiny microbes or cellular remnants of life. If so, NASA's Europa Clipper may one day be able to find life near Jupiter.

A new lab-based study shows that a single grain of ice could contain enough material to detect signs of life on one of the moons in our solar system.

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 22, 2024 - A joint study by the University of Washington, Seattle, and Freie Universitat Berlin has found that ice grains ejected from moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter may carry detectable signs of life. This