Friday 16 March 2012

Oxygen Found on Saturn's moon

Oxygen was detected in the upper atmosphere of Saturn's moon Dione one of the 62 celestial bodies orbiting around a sixth of the "rock" around the sun.

The discovery came on the instrument spacecraft "Cassini" - which was launched 1997th year - called the "Cassini Plasma Spectrometer," flyover during the months of 2010. year.

This tiny moon is only 1.126 kilometers in diameter, and seems to be made of thick ice that surrounds the core bit. Around Saturn visit every 2.7 days and was constantly bombarded by ions ejected powerful magnetosphere of its planet. They hit the surface of Dione, releasing molecular oxygen ions, to be sucked Saturn again due to ourselves.

- The concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere Dion roughly similar to the one you can not find the some 500 miles above Earth - says Robert Turner, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

- It is not enough to sustain life, but it is definitely an example of the process in which oxygen is formed on icy celestial bodies are bombarded with charged particles or photons from the sun or any light source which is near - he adds.

The researchers - who did not believe that either Dion large enough to support the exosphere - now dig through the data he collected, "Cassini" to find some more information to help them in search of wildlife outside of our "home" planet.

Some of them believe that the month is below the water surface, as is the case with Jupiter's satellite Europa, molecular oxygen is combined with carbon in the subsurface lakes could have blocks of living space: although researchers at the University of South Florida announced that the oceans are too Europium acid for that.

"Cassini" are now turning to another Saturn moon, Enkeladusu: one of the brightest objects in our solar system that reflects almost all light it receives, due to the surface of ice crystals. What will discover there, unfortunately we will learn only a few years.

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