Pluto has been grabbing the headlines, but Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is easier to visit and more likely to host life.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made its closest fly-by of the moon’s north pole on 14 October and is sending back stunning images of the frigid, cratered landscape.


Enceladus’ claim to fame are the giant geysers of salty water spraying from its south pole, which Cassini spotted shortly after arriving at the Saturn system in 2005. Since then, we’ve seen evidence that the moon has a deep, perhaps global underground ocean, and that it could keep itself warm inside with hydrothermal vents – a boon for anything living there.

These new images are of the north pole, not the spouting south. But they are the closest ever, taken from just 1839 kilometres above the surface, and show the entire moon is pummelled with craters and laced with cracks.

“The northern regions are criss-crossed by a spidery network of gossamer-thin cracks that slice through the craters,” said Paul Helfenstein, a member of the Cassini imaging team at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in a statement. “These thin cracks are ubiquitous on Enceladus, and now we see that they extend across the northern terrains as well.”

Cassini’s next fly-by of Enceladus comes on 28 October, when it will swoop to within just 49 kilometres of the south pole and sample the material in those tantalising plumes.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute