In this artistic rendition, ice plumes are seen shooting out of Enceladus at up to 800 miles per hour. NASA is acknowledged.
One question remains unanswered despite the ongoing advancements in astrophysics research and technology: is life found elsewhere in the universe? Despite the fact that there are hundreds of billions of celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy alone, scientists frequently focus their ongoing search on three essential components: organic material, energy, and water. Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn, is a prime target in the search for life because evidence suggests that it is a “ocean world” with all three.
Over the course of its two-decade mission, the NASA spacecraft Cassini found that ice plumes shoot out of Enceladus’ surface at a speed of about 800 miles per hour (400 meters per second). The chance to gather samples and investigate the makeup of Enceladus’ oceans and their potential habitability is greatly enhanced by these plumes. Until now, it was unclear, though, if the speed of the plumes would break up any organic materials inside the ice grains, deteriorating the samples.
The detection of amino acids during spacecraft sampling is now supported by clear laboratory evidence provided by researchers from the University of California, San Diego, indicating that these amino acids can survive impact speeds of up to 4.2 km/s while being transported in these ice plumes. The National Academy of Sciences Proceedings publishes their research.
Robert Continetti, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego, and his colleagues built a special aerosol impact spectrometer in 2012 with the goal of studying the collision dynamics of individual aerosols and particles at high velocities. It turned out to be the ideal machine to study ice grain impacts, even though it wasn’t designed with that purpose in mind.
“The ability to choose individual particles and accelerate or decelerate them to specific final velocities makes this apparatus unique in the world, according to Continetti. “From several micron diameters down to hundreds of nanometers, in a variety of materials, we’re able to examine particle behavior, such as how they scatter or how their structures change upon impact.”
NASA
NASA is going to launch the Europa Clipper to Jupiter in 2024. Similar in composition to Enceladus, Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, is also an ocean world. It is hoped that the Clipper and other future missions to Saturn will be able to detect a particular set of molecules in the ice grains that may indicate whether or not life is present in the subterranean oceans of these moons. However, the molecules must survive their rapid ejection from the moon and subsequent collection by the probe.
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While the structure of some of the molecules found in ice particles has been studied, Continetti and colleagues are the first to measure the effects of a single ice grain striking a surface.
In order to conduct the experiment, electrospray ionization—a technique in which water is forced through a needle that is charged to a high degree of pressure—was used to produce ice grains. This process breaks the water into progressively smaller droplets. After being injected, the droplets freeze in a vacuum.
After determining the grains’ mass and charge, the researchers used image charge detectors to watch the grains as they passed through the spectrometer. Installing a microchannel plate ion detector allowed for precise timing of the impact moment, down to the nanosecond.
The findings demonstrated that amino acids, which are frequently referred to as the building blocks of life, can be found up to 4.2 km/s impact velocities with only limited fragmentation.
“To get an idea of what kind of life may be possible in the solar system, you want to know there hasn’t been a lot of molecular fragmentation in the sampled ice grains, so you can get that fingerprint of whatever it is that makes it a self-contained life form,” Continetti stated. “Our work shows that this is possible with the ice plumes of Enceladus.”
Intriguing queries about chemistry itself are also brought up by Continetti’s research, such as how salt influences the ability to detect specific amino acids. Enceladus is thought to have more large, salted oceans than Earth does. This could indicate that certain molecules cluster on the surface of the ice grains, increasing their likelihood of being noticed, since salt alters the characteristics of water as a solvent as well as the solubility of various molecules.
“The implications this has for detecting life elsewhere in the solar system without missions to the surface of these ocean-world moons is very exciting, but our work goes beyond biosignatures in ice grains,” Continetti said. It also affects basic chemistry in some ways. The idea of investigating how chemical reactions sparked by ice grain impact form the building blocks of life, in the tradition of UC San Diego founding faculty Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, excites us.
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