Enceladus is blanketed in a thick layer of snow

The fluff suggests the moon’s famous plume was once more active than it is today

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is shrouded in a thick layer of snow. In some places, the downy stuff is 700 meters deep, new research suggests.

“It’s like Buffalo, but worse,” says planetary scientist Emily Martin, referring to the famously snowy city in New York. The snow depth suggests that Enceladus’ dramatic plume may have been more active in the past, Martin and colleagues report in the Mar. 1 Icarus.

Planetary scientists have been fascinated by Enceladus’ geysers, made up of water vapor and other ingredients, since the Cassini spacecraft spotted them in 2005 (SN: 12/16/22). The spray probably comes from a salty ocean beneath an icy shell.

Some of that water goes to form one of Saturn’s rings (SN: 5/2/06). But most of it falls back onto the moon’s surface as snow, Martin says. Understanding the properties of that snow — its thickness and how dense and compact it is — could help reveal Enceladus’ history, and lay groundwork for future missions to this moon.

“If you’re going to land a robot there, you need to understand what it’s going to be landing into,” says Martin, of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

To figure out how thick Enceladus’ snow is, Martin and colleagues looked to Earth — specifically, Iceland. The island country hosts geological features called pit chains, which are lines of pockmarks in the ground formed when loose rubble such as rocks, ice or snow drains into a crack underneath (SN: 10/23/18). Similar features show up all over the solar system, including Enceladus.  …