Enceladus hides a salty ocean beneath its ice but also blasts that ocean directly into space, which means a spacecraft can test water from a potentially habitable sea simply by flying through the plume — no landing, drilling, or journey through kilometres of frozen crust required.

Saturn's moon offers a shortcut to one of space exploration's hardest problems: scientists may finally sample an alien ocean without drilling through miles of ice. The post Enceladus hides a salty ocean beneath its ice but also blasts that ocean directly into space, which means a spacecraft can test water from a potentially habitable sea simply by flying through the plume — no landing, drilling, or journey through kilometres of frozen crust required. appeared first on Space Daily .