NASA hopes to find alien worlds in 2 Solar system moons

MOSCOW (PNA/Sputnik) – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is preparing to explore two Solar System moons which scientists say may be inhabited with alien life.

While the exploration of Jupiter’s satellite Europa is already scheduled for the early 2020s, the fate of a flyby around Saturn’s moon Enceladus remains more uncertain, according to Space.com, though researchers hope a probe will be launched by 2021.

What’s key is that, according to experts, both Europa and Enceladus have the best chances among all Solar System bodies for hosting life, as they both possess underground oceans.

NASA’s Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) project seeks to gather samples from the purportedly habitable oceans without even landing on the surface of the moon. There are geysers throwing a mix of water ice, salts, and carboncontaining organics from underneath the icy shell of Enceladus, and Saturn’s gravitational field forms plumes that aren’t dissolved in space.

"It's free samples," Cornell University’s Jonathan Lunine, who is also ELF’s concept principal investigator, said of the plumes. "We don't need to land, drill, melt or do anything like that."

Under the terms of the project, ELF will be launched with a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. After 9.5 years of space journey, it will approach Saturn, and fly through Enceladus’s plumes between eight and ten times, collecting samples, during a three year period.