Project
Spacecraft mission to Saturn that studied the planet, its rings and its moons, including close observation of Titan.
Researchers led by Frank Postberg found sharply different salt mixtures across 961 Cassini spectra of salty Enceladus grains. Tokyo freezing experiments suggest each grain is a shard of a slowly frozen droplet, so the ocean's makeup shows in how often each salt appears.
Reality
Institute of Science Tokyo researchers found that salts separate inside 200-micrometre lab droplets frozen at about 10 K a minute or slower. Slow freezing in the vents could explain Cassini's oddly varied Enceladus grains, though the droplets held salts and organics remain untested.
Reality
Saturn's northern hexagon has looked the same for more than 40 years, so a second polygon that only shows up in images from 2023 onward hands atmospheric modellers a formation they can watch happen rather than a finished structure to explain.
Perspective Coverage
10 publishersReality
Frank Postberg's team finds that Enceladus plume droplets freeze slowly, sorting salts and organics into separate grains a few micrometers across. A probe would need to check many grains to find one holding microbial material, though that grain should be easy to read.
Reality
Eleanor Cornish and Tyler Robinson put a wind-roughened ocean into the rfast atmospheric tool and found the specular flash still separable from a dry planet at 120 degrees, ten degrees below earlier estimates.
Reality