Tomorrow at 11:22 a.m., NASA's Cassini probe will fly just 30 miles over the south pole of Enceladus, right through a geyser spray from the moon's ocean.

Enceladus, size-wise, isn't much to write home about. Saturn's tiny moon is a little more than 300 miles in diameter, and covered entirely in an ice shell. But below that shell, the tiny moon hides a giant, warm global ocean. Gravitational forces from Saturn create geysers that spew forth from cracks in the ice sheet.

The encounter will last just a few seconds, but it will be able to answer at least one big question: could it support life? It will not, however, be able to look for life itself.

"We can detect complex organics," Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist, said in a press conference. "We don't have the range of mass detection to find DNA or any other large molecules that could detect evidence of life."

Those few seconds will yield invaluable data, including photographs of the plumes, spectroscopy of their composition, temperature measurements, and more that will characterize the ocean beneath the icy world. Along with Jupiter's moon, Europa, Enceladus is considered one of the most likely candidates in the solar system to harbor life. If life exists there, Spilker suspects that it wouldn't be much more complex than tiny fish.

It may take weeks or months for all of the data to be analyzed, a wait worth it to determine if the ocean may be habitable. It will also be the closest the Cassini craft, which has studied the Saturn system since 2006, will have come to the surface of Enceladus. A previous flyby took it 50 miles above the surface, not enough to sample much of the ocean.

"We will plunge deeper into that magnificent plume on the south pole than we ever have before," Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist, said in the press conference.

"This is a very big step and a new era of exploring ocean worlds in our solar system," Spilker said.

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