Saturn's moon Enceladus may be harbouring pre-biotic processes! A European instrument team on the joint ESA-NASA Cassini-Huygens mission to the ringed planet has discovered sodium salts in the ice grains of the planet's outermost ring. This ring is replenished by the geysers on the small icy moon Enceladus. In a paper just published in Nature, the scientists using data from the Cosmic Dust Analyser developed at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, say the detection of salt implies that the moon has ocean-sized reservoirs of water beneath its surface. Conditions there could provide a suitable environment for the formation of life's precursors.

This A and B-Roll provides extensive imagery of Enceladus and explanations (in English and German) of this discovery by Dr. Ralf SRAMA, the Principal Investigator of the Cosmic Dust Analyser instrument.