Astronomy
Tracking satellites at the speed of light
2025 marks a landmark year for Europe’s ‘bridge between Earth and space’. The European Space Agency’s Estrack satellite tracking network turns 50.
Since its inception in 1975, Estrack – ESA’s global network of ground stations – has formed the vital communication bridge between satellites in orbit and mission control at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.
Now comprising six stations spanning six countries, Estrack has grown into a strategic asset for Europe, enabling communication with spacecraft, transmitting commands and receiving scientific data.
The network keeps an eye on satellites no matter their location: tracking them across Earth orbit, voyaging to comets or asteroids, keeping station at the scientifically important Sun-Earth Lagrange points, and deep into our Solar System. It even keeps tabs on European launchers as they soar into orbit, ensuring no rocket is ever out of reach.
This year, ESA is also expanding its deep space communication capabilities with the construction of a new 35-metre deep space antenna – the fourth of its kind. It will be joining the existing one at New Norcia station, Australia, to help meet the Agency's fast increasing data download needs.
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Earth from Space: Kilauea lava lake, Hawaii
#765: Rockets vs The Environment
This week, we look at the process behind rockets getting licensed to launch, and everyone around the pad getting notified to stay away as T-0 approaches. (Can you say “errant boat”?) We have a saying around here: “One does not simply book a return trip from a rocket launch.” That’s because they are an intensely complex chain of events that need to go right before it’s wise to let that rocket leave the launchpad.
Show Notes- Rocket impacts
- Re-entry impacts
- Ozone
- Scale vs aviation
- Light pollution
- Wildlife
- Methane
- Atmospheric physics
- Launch growth
- Cadence plans
- Human tech & ecosystems
- Minimize harm
- Factor externalities in policy & economics
- CTA: Support research, responsible launch/sat policies, and dark-sky initiatives.
Fraser Cain:
AstronomyCast, Episode 765, Rockets vs. the Environment. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know.
I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I am doing well. We are recording this on the fall equinox. It’s all downhill from here.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah, we can feel it. The weather definitely, definitely changed. Things are cooler, the wind is up.
Hopefully the rain will return. We’re still waiting on any amount of rain here. It’s been five months now since we’ve had serious rainfall.
Yeah, everything is just parched. So, you know, deep into September, the wildfire warning is still pretty extreme. So hopefully we will get just a miserable storm that will just dump a ton of rain on us and reset us back to some level of normality.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I have to admit we are in that strange time of year in Southern Illinois where all of my morning glories are wildly blooming everywhere and the leaves are changing and I kind of dig the combination.
Fraser Cain:
Like bindweed? Kill it with fire. The white flowers?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Little blue flowers. Little blue flowers.
Fraser Cain:
All right, all right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
They’re good.
Fraser Cain:
We don’t launch a lot of rockets every year, so their impact on the environment is minimal compared to other forms of transportation. But that number is steadily increasing with rates that we’ll have to take seriously. What’s the current and future impact of rockets on the environment?
So give us a sense of the environmental impact. I guess, what are the forms, what are the ways that rockets can harm the environment compared to, you know, other forms of transportation that we’re familiar with?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So we have a number of different things going on. We have both launch and return to consider.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And on the way up, we have the sonic boom, which can deeply confuse and disturb surrounding animals. We have, in the case of the way SpaceX does things, there is usually a cloud of very cold, formerly liquid gas that goes across the landscape, chilling everything in its path. We have, as the rockets go up through the atmosphere, depending on if they’re solid rocket or the liquid oxygen that is so popular, or methane, which is becoming popular, you’re putting gases into the atmosphere at altitudes they may not normally be at.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And then not to mention solid rockets, which produce other kinds of chemicals, again, at different altitudes.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And then we have satellites falling back down through the atmosphere. Satellites now need to have a five years after they’re no longer planned to be used plan for how to get them out of the way of everything else. And that generally includes burning them up in the atmosphere.
That drops particulate matter into the upper part of the atmosphere, where we are not sure if the dominant factor is going to be increasing the reflectivity of the planet or increasing the ability of greenhouse effect as light that goes up gets re-radiated back down. We’re still figuring out that balance.
Fraser Cain:
And there’s also damage to the ozone layer from those satellites.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
Burning up in the atmosphere.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And if something blows up, as Starship has done, it can actually put a hole in the ionosphere, which is fun.
Fraser Cain:
And then there are rockets that don’t make it all the way up to space and they don’t burn up in the atmosphere. And instead, they crashed into the ocean. And so, for example, the Space Launch System is going to crash the first stage into the ocean and sink to the bottom of the ocean and break up.
But yeah, you’ve got the plume of steam, of hot steam that comes out from the water system that tries to deal with the noise from the rockets that is blown out across the landscape. So there’s a bunch of things that are happening. There’s then all of the transportation that’s required, all of the maintenance, all of the infrastructure that’s required to get a rocket ready to launch.
In some cases, rockets are taken, you know, they’re constructed in California and then they’re taken on train all the way across the United States or on truck to be able to get to the launch site in Florida. So you’ve got all the separate component parts that are all coming together to launch this rocket. And now at this point, I’m sure those of you who are concerned about our impact on the environment would like to get a sense of the scale.
So do we have a sense of like how much rockets contribute to damage to the environment?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So there are detailed studies coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that look at different factors. So for instance, my favorite thing that has been done so far is near Vandenberg is a beach where sea lions like to raise their young. And prior to allowing an ongoing launch license for SpaceX, which has far more launches out of Vandenberg than anyone else has had, they were required to monitor for a period of time how the sea lions reacted to sonic booms to make sure that the number of sea lions typically seen on the beach was not decreasing as an impact of having the sonic boom race across their beach.
There are also studies that look at what are the basically regions in which you’re going to have different amounts of sound, that chest vibrating noise that can actually cause damage to ears and what kinds of wildlife is within that. And so here they’re literally doing, okay, so we’ve seen this rocket go up. We know that it causes this many seabirds to just go away, cease to live within that region.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, don’t want to live there anymore.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. We know how much bigger the next rocket they’re planning to put is. Let’s now run calculations to model the decrease in seabirds and shoreline critters and alligators or something you have to worry about in Florida.
They go through and they look at all the different wildlife that is native to the area and that may decide it doesn’t want to live there anymore as a result of the impact of rockets. It turns out seabirds don’t care very much. They are seeing order of a few percent decreased, 10% decrease with bigger and bigger rockets.
The sea lions also do not seem to care very much. The biggest impact they’ve seen was a literal impact. It turns out that if you violently blow up the starship, you’re about to test the engines on for no clear reason.
I mean, they figured out the reason there was a starship that they were getting ready to test. One of the canisters became overpressured. The entire thing violently exploded and it shed pieces all over a beach where baby turtles were hatching.
And baby turtles can’t necessarily figure out how to go around pieces of exploded starship. So don’t explode your rockets was the primary thing.
Fraser Cain:
Don’t explode your rockets. Don’t explode your rockets. But, and, and that is, I mean, there are, there are like, again, I think like if people, people are going to feel really mad about this environmental damage or even this environmental impact that you are making this place that is scary and undesirable for the homes, for various mammals and seabirds, uh, that you are going to disrupt the patterns of animals that have had their, you know, their evolutionary process, their instincts have led them to these places. And so they don’t, you know, they can’t, you know, pack up and move somewhere else that this is going to have an impact on them.
That said, I mean, highways that crisscross the, the country, which are just killing zones for animals that are attempting to migrate. Uh, if you, we drove in Australia and it is just dead kangaroo, dead kangaroo, just a graveyard of animals here in Canada. It’s deer, um, moose elk.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Armadillos. Armadillos are suicidal.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Armadillos, turtles. So, uh, you know, there’s so much, you know, transportation, birds hitting the windows of your cars.
Like, like there are the, you know, the, what we do with mining, right. To a chunk of it. And so I think it’s great.
You know, we should definitely have a serious consideration about this, but you know, these are the kinds of concerns that animate you, uh, get, get out there and help work on minimizing humanity’s impact on the natural world because it is everywhere.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I do maintain you shouldn’t explode your rockets.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, well, obviously, but I mean like exploding rockets is not part of the plan. Exploding rockets is, is definitely part of the process and is definitely going to happen, but it is not the, you know, not every rocket is going to explode before the thing takes off from the, from the launch pad. So, you know, like the, like the, you know, this is a concern we actually didn’t talk about, which is light pollution.
Right. That, that, that there are star links that are passing through the night sky that if you look up now, if you could see the star links, there would be this giant grid. There would be hundreds of star links in the sky from your dozens, maybe dozens, but eventually it’ll be hundreds and that this is going to, you know, you can’t see it with your eyes, but they are contributing a generalized glow that is making satellite observations just a little bit harder.
Not to mention the ones that run directly through any imaging that a giant telescope is doing at certain times of the year. So there’s sort of like this increase in overall light pollution, the sky glow, as well as the direct harm. And, you know, people are very angry about this.
And yet a third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way. Like the, our ability to see the sky has been completely taken from us because people can’t remember or can’t be bothered to use the kinds of lights that are best and point them towards the ground that we have to just point these things up in the sky and, and take away this, this view that is causing enormous harm to, uh, to animals that are tempted to migrate, et cetera.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s something where, again, we have to compare and contrast. So for instance, the World Trade Center Memorial lights, when they get turned on, they can’t leave them on for very long because birds will get stuck in them and just go in circles because they can’t figure out how to navigate once they’re in the light. But the satellite constellations are something that it’s important to understand how these things work.
They want to have multiple low altitude to decrease latency satellites overhead all the time. So ideally something like five satellites out at a time in your sky, this is on top of the GPS satellites that have to be there already per network. And it’s a per network issue.
Fraser Cain:
Just like GPS is a per national collaboration, Chinese ones, you’re going to have the American ones, you’re going to have the European ones. They’re all going to be overhead.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and so as we layer orbit with more and more and more satellites to accomplish things with competing companies, it’s, it’s going to increase what we’re trying to look through. And then, and then there, there is this thing called reflect orbital. All of you go to reflect orbital.com at some point, they’re looking to build satellites that what they say on their website is reflect orbital is delivering sunlight by building a constellation of in space mirrors and, and they show solar panels at night receiving sunlight. And I really want this to be the onion, but they’re proudly saying they’ve secured 20 million in series a funding.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and so we’re also looking at a future where if someone wants to make sure that they’re all day, all night wedding celebration is well lit, you’d order up a satellite.
Fraser Cain:
Right. All right. So we rattled off a bunch of atmospheric gases that are being delivered and they have different potentially battling impacts on the environment.
So let’s just start with the, the greenhouse gases.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Methane. Methane is the one that worries me the most. We’re looking to power more and more rockets with methane.
It is a, it is one of the most serious greenhouse gases out there and it does break down in sunlight. So when you release methane into the atmosphere, it’s not going to stay there for years. It’s going to stay there for months breakdown under UV.
But while it’s there, it is contributing to as infrared light tries to leave our planet. So sunlight comes through in all the colors of the rainbow and colors redder and bluer than what we can see in our eyes. All that light comes through.
It warms the surface of our planet. It warms the atmosphere around us and warm things re-radiate in infrared. It’s black body radiation.
Ideally, a lot of that heat energy then radiates back out into space. But just like a greenhouse you might build in your backyard where the glass serves to keep the infrared warm light, warm photons inside your greenhouse. Well, putting methane into our atmosphere keeps that infrared warm light within our atmosphere, continuing to keep our atmosphere warmer than it necessarily would have been in the past.
This leads to long term heat. So, okay, there’s methane. That’s one issue.
We worry about ozone. We worry about how ozone is getting broken down as they add other chemicals to the atmosphere. There is concern that increased launch activity is creating a new northern hemisphere ozone hole.
And ozone holes, as any Australian can let you know, increase how much ultraviolet light is able to come down through our atmosphere. So each of these different gases that goes into the atmosphere changes what light comes through the atmosphere and reflects back away from the planet.
Fraser Cain:
Mm hmm.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Too much ultraviolet coming through due to holes in the ozone layer, reduction in the amount of ozone at the correct altitude in the atmosphere means more ultraviolet light and more cancers. And so we’re actually making ourselves sick by launching too many rockets that are depleting the ozone layer.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But it’s really important to understand here that the amounts that are, the depletion is very low, right? Currently.
So there was a study that was done, we reported this earlier this year, that right now with the current launch rates of in the sort of 200 to 300 launches per year, that it’s not outpacing the restoration of the ozone layer based on the reduction of chlorofluorocarbons. But you get up to the about say 1200 rate rockets per year, which is not inconceivable, then those numbers flip. And now the amount of damage to the ozone layer is happening faster than the amount that the lack, you know, than the thing is repairing.
And so everything turns around and goes the other way. And the sweet spot, or I guess the target to look at is, it’s around the 700 launches ish per year, 750 launches per year. So as we get closer to that 750 launches per year, then we will start to sort of zero out the damage that we’re doing or the restoration of the ozone layer and start to move in the other direction.
And then the other thing, and like this is, you know, when you think about say carbon dioxide, one transatlantic flight is about the same amount of carbon dioxide produced as one rocket launch. And that one, you know, one rocket launch is going to, you know, how many, you know, you’re going to get a couple of hundred launches per year when you’re going to have, what, tens of thousands of flights a day, right? Thousands of flights a day.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, so all of that is true, but one of the concerns is the altitude at which the gases are getting released.
Fraser Cain:
And the, and the, the kind of, of, um, uh, the plume. So, so they’re very sooty. Yeah.
Rocket launches are very sooty. And so they produce a lot of fine particles that, as you say, are, are making their way into layers of the atmosphere that we’ve never seen that before. And that comes back to what you said earlier, which is that in fact, potentially we’re looking at, um, uh, potentially a cooling effect in sort of the same way that we had the, the shipping when they removed the sulfur dioxide from their fuels that actually things warmed up because they were these clouds, these persistent clouds of the shipping lanes were going away in the Atlantic.
So it’s like so confusing.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And the scale is really something that, that I, I have to give you actual numbers. It’s currently September 22nd. So far this year, we’ve had 222 launch attempts, according to rocket launch.live, um, eight of them ceased to be rockets prior to getting very high. So 2025, 222 at this point, looking back at 2020 in 2020 for the entire year, there were 114 looking back at 2015, there were 85 for the entire year. So we are going up very rapidly and they’re looking at adding dozens of launches per year of the Falcon 9 to Vandenberg. They’re looking to add order of 80 per pad Starship launches to, uh, Cape Canaveral.
I don’t know what numbers they’re aiming for, for, uh, Boca Chico. I haven’t read those reports yet. So we’re looking at with just one company, massive, massive increases in launches.
Now you start to propagate this across, you see Blue Origin is launching more and more of, of their smaller rockets. They’re starting to get their larger rockets going. You have Rocket Lab is just there slow and steady getting the job done.
And China is really working hard to catch up, uh, looking at launches by country. We’ve had 54 launches so far this year that were successful from China.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. So we talked about this and again, it’s very complicated and this is something that’s a lot of work on about the gases that are going out from the rocket as the thing is taking off. But you have the, the end of life and the most efficient way to deal with rockets with debris with satellites is to have them reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and that they are introducing very specific types of particles at an altitude that, that you don’t, don’t normally see.
That said, there is about a hundred tons of debris that is falling into the atmosphere every day from space.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
But that is generally silicon oxide, iron oxide, you know, it is, it is chunks of rock.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Not the kinds of exotic materials like aluminum, titanium, uh, the, the stuff that goes into solar panels. So it’s a different mix. What kind of impact are we expecting to see from these reentering satellites?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So one of the concerns is there’s a whole lot of aluminum used in space manufacturing. Uh, star, Starship by SpaceX is one of the exceptions. They’re using steel.
Most companies are using a lot of aluminum because it gives you a really good lightweight material that you can then use to support whatever the outer shell of your craft is. All that aluminum in the atmosphere appears to be the kind of particulate matter that’s capable of staying lofted in the atmosphere for long periods of time, which is a problem and then acting as a potential greenhouse gas feels like the wrong term to use, but I mean, it’s a greenhouse material that is changing the reflectivity of the atmosphere.
Fraser Cain:
And damaging the ozone layer.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. And that’s the, and that’s another kind of direct thing that you’re getting. So, so you’re getting this again, direct damage to the ozone layer and you’ve got the rockets going up and you’ve got the, the material coming back down, damaging the ozone layer and you’ve got the additional.
And I think I can see why you’re like, it’s not so cut and dry. You can’t just say it’s going to be like carbon dioxide or even methane or even water vapor injected into the atmosphere. It’s complicated that you’ve got this stuff coming down and adding soot at layers where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to absorb temperature, but then it’s going to be changing temperatures at other layers.
So it’s going to make the climate, the atmosphere stack more complicated.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
There’s weird, weird effects. We’re still trying to figure out. So for instance, as you put more and more conductive molecules into the atmosphere, how is that going to affect things like Aurora and magnetic fields and things like that?
We’re figuring it out. It’s going to be affecting both light coming down and light going back out. How does that balance out?
And then we also have to remember that not everything burns up completely. And a lot of these spacecraft have on board fuels that allow them to adjust their altitude for however long they intend to be functioning. And so now there’s always that concern of, well, did that carry hydrazine?
Did that carry some poisonous component that’s going to make its way down? Or is it just something that has chunks that are… We like to bomb Australia.
It’s not on purpose. It just happens to be big and… They’re big, yeah.
Yeah, it…
Fraser Cain:
Underfoot.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Catches things. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So between concern of remaining gases on board that are going to end up either on the ground or in the atmosphere, between now we’re putting new kinds of particulate materials that aren’t the pieces of rock that we’re used to burning up in the atmosphere, between not understanding how these particles are necessarily going to stay lofted, not fully understanding how they’re going to interact with each other to stay lofted in the planet’s magnetic field, there’s a whole lot of stuff we just don’t know.
And one of the things that always kind of sticks in the back of my mind is, in research on climate change, the biggest differences between what we’re seeing today and what was predicted in the early 2000s when we started talking about this with major papers coming out in around 2003, the mistakes we have made have been in lack of imagination about all the sources that we’re going to have for things producing greenhouse gases and lack of understanding all the atmospheric details.
Now, the one thing I can say is as we keep dumping completely empty boosters that previously contained liquid fuels, we are creating potential coral reefs. I’m a fan of potential coral reefs, but that’s the only good thing I’ve seen so far. And you know, the Navy already had it handled.
They were dumping old ships. It worked. We don’t necessarily need rockets too.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yep. So, I mean, what do you think can be done about this?
I mean, I think we should just be, we can guarantee that humanity’s interest in launching rockets will increase.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And that we will probably blow through what are wise limits in number of rockets to launch.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
What I just don’t know right now is we live in a world where there are economic factors that are dominated by people trying to obtain so much wealth that it becomes power at the national, global level that they’re going to prioritize obtaining wealth over welfare of humanity.
Fraser Cain:
I mean, I don’t sort of necessarily buy into that personally that, you know, everybody driving their cars all the time, everybody hopping on airplanes, everyone getting on cruise ships, everybody, everybody burning and contributing.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So I hear what you’re saying, but the majority of the greenhouse gases and other materials that are infecting our atmosphere are produced by, I forget how many corporations it is, but it’s.
Fraser Cain:
70 or something, 40, some small number. Yeah, of course.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So the majority of the impact is not coming from those airplanes. It is coming from industry. It’s coming from industry.
Fraser Cain:
And so. Or the industry that makes the airplanes, right? Like the, I mean, there are externalities and I guess this is where I think this conversation always needs to end to, which is that there are externalities, that you can’t just launch a rocket and not think about what you’re doing to the environment, that there are costs and whether, whether the costs have to be paid today or the costs have to be paid in the future, somebody is going to have to pay the costs. And in general, if you’re organized, you minimize the cost that anybody’s ever gonna have to pay ever right from the beginning. You take this, you take these future costs very seriously.
This potential tragedy of the commons and that that there are actions that we can take both in the types of fuels people are proposing, soot-free rocket fuels. People are proposing ways of making satellites, you know, either dumping them in in so they hold together and don’t burn up in the atmosphere, right? Like there’s a lot of ideas from cradle to grave on what you can do for the entire rocket industry.
For me, my hope is that we switch to a space-based infrastructure. That we, that if we’re gonna need things in space, we build them out in space. They don’t come from Earth.
And then they don’t have to crash back down to Earth. They just have never, they were born off Earth, they stay off Earth. That, that who cares what’s, you know, sort of how much pollution they’re causing because it’s just out in space.
That would be my preference. And that we shift away. Then maybe there’s this future where we launch a couple of rockets a year of people going off into space and that none of the other infrastructure is required.
Everything just happens off off Earth. But, but until then, we need to figure out ways to minimize their footprint now for when we know that it’s going to, you know, ruin the commons in the future.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and this is where people who, like so many of you out there watching, who want to understand the peer-reviewed, published science behind conversations like we’re having today, need to make their voices heard. Because we’re seeing in, in so many nations around the world, with my own nation leading the charge it appears, that, that profit is dominating in the short term over the long-term taking care of our world to make sure that economies continue into the future. And we’re even hearing far too many discussions about, you don’t need to worry because the rupture is coming.
Fraser Cain:
Right, yeah. So consider the externalities.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
You know, when you are making proposals, consider the externalities. When you are government, when you’re writing laws, consider the externalities. Make sure that they are part of the process and that then people can make a better decision on what is the true cost of some technology once you consider the long-term ramifications of what it’s going to be doing to the environment.
Because it is a, it’s a shared space for all of us.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And there is no one answer. That’s the important thing to remember. It’s sort of like, I should never own an electric vehicle because what goes into building one is substantial and we drive maybe 5,000 miles a year.
So yeah, it’s the answer.
Fraser Cain:
That’s a whole other conversation.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
It’s about nine months of driving an electric car then balances out and then it’s all gravy between an ICE and an electric car. That’s another conversation for another show. All right.
Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all of the people out there who support us through Patreon. We are in the process of updating our levels and what we’re doing.
We’re adding a new That Takes Math Q&A show in which I am working out problems that we are unable to answer during our live recordings because that takes math. So if you would like access to the live recordings of that insanity and so much more, check us out on astronomycast.com slash Patreon. No, I said that wrong.
On patreon.com slash astronomycast. I need to make both links work.
Fraser Cain:
We should make both work. Yeah, if you go to astronomycast, it takes you over to Patreon. Thanks, Pamela.
We’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.
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Enceladus’ ice continues to get more and more intriguing as researchers continue to unlock more secrets taken from a probe over ten years ago. When Cassini crashed into Saturn in 2017, it ended a 13 year sojourn that is still producing new research papers today. A recent one in Nature Astronomy from the researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Stuttgart found hints of organic molecules discovered for the first time on the icy moon, some of which could serve as precursors to even more advanced biomolecules.
Enceladus Isn't Throwing As Much Ice Into Orbit As We Thought
Modeling something like geysers on a far-away moon seems like it should be easy. How much complexity could there possibly be when a geyser is simply a hole in some ice shooting superheated water through it? The answer is pretty complex, to be honest - enough that accurate models require a supercomputer to run on. Luckily, the supercomputing cluster at the University of Texas, known as the Texas Advanced Computing Center, gave some time to researcher modeling Enceladus’ ice plumes, and their recent paper in JGR Planets discusses the results, which show there might not be as much water and ice getting blown into orbit as originally thought.
