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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Cassini's ongoing mission and raw images _ High tide on Enceladus

Posted by: AlexBlackwell May 16 2007, 05:01 PM

There are two new Enceladus-related papers in the http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7142/index.html: one by Nimmo et al. and one by Hurford et al. There is also an accompanying News and Views piece by Andrew Dombard. See the http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7142/edsumm/e070517-08.html for a synopsis and links.

Note: Those without access to Nature may wish to keep an eye on http://es.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/papers.html. Reprints are often posted there.

Posted by: AlexBlackwell May 16 2007, 05:08 PM

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070516_enceladus_plumes.html
By Ker Than
Staff Writer, Space.com
posted: 16 May 2007
01:01 pm ET

http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=1293
University of California Santa Cruz
May 17, 2007

Posted by: AlexBlackwell May 16 2007, 07:19 PM

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=748
(Source: Goddard Space Flight Center)
May 16, 2007

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09209

Posted by: nprev May 16 2007, 07:25 PM

From the Stephens article:

"In the new paper, the researchers estimated the thickness of the ice shell to be at least 5 kilometers (3 miles) and probably several tens of kilometers or miles. They also estimated that the movement along the fault lines is about half a meter over the course of a tidal period." (BF & italics added by me).

Good grief...that's HUGE if those faults extend any depth into the shell!

Posted by: AlexBlackwell May 16 2007, 08:07 PM

There are two interesting related papers in the June 2007 issue of Icarus:

Tidal heating in Enceladus
Jennifer Meyer and Jack Wisdom
Icarus 188, 535-539 (2007)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2007.03.001
http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/users/wisdom/enceladus.pdf

Enceladus: Present internal structure and differentiation by early and long-term radiogenic heating
Gerald Schubert, John D. Anderson, Bryan J. Travis and Jennifer Palguta
Icarus 188, 345-355 (2007)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2006.12.012

Posted by: AlexBlackwell May 16 2007, 08:12 PM

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ May 16 2007, 07:01 AM)

Note: Those without access to Nature may wish to keep an eye on http://es.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/papers.html. Reprints are often posted there.

The Nimmo et al. paper and supplementary information is now available at the above link.

Posted by: volcanopele May 16 2007, 09:53 PM

hmm, interesting papers. My only comment is that the predicted shear stress, which leads to variations in long-term heat flow, doesn't quite match the CIRS observations. In particular, it seems to predict that the anti-Saturnian ends of Cairo and Alexandria Sulci are coolest while CIRS shows this as a local maximum. The explanation for the temperatures observed however definitely seems plausible.