Saturn ’s moon Enceladus , with its sea under its icy surface , expect likeit could host some chassis of microbial life . Now , Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is turn over fund a mission there .
Milner is currently behind several other projects that you might have heard of . Breakthrough Starshotis his plan to send a probe to Proxima Centauri , whileBreakthrough Listenis look for signals from thinking life .
At The Economist ’s New Space Age group discussion in Seattleearlier this month , he adumbrate a possible new speculation , which is to send off a privately fund spacecraft to Enceladus and reckon for life-time . He said he had run a workshop with a group of experts to seem into the possiblity , which is still in its very early stages .
“ Can we design a low - cost , in camera funded mission to Enceladus which can be set in motion relatively soon , and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes , to prove to see what ’s going on there ? ” he say .
Thanks to theCassini mission , we know that Enceladus is fire out plumes of water from its subsurface ocean which many contain organics , the ingredients of life . The next step is to work out if there is actually any life story in the ocean at all .
NASA is looking into anumber of proposalsto do this , including the Enceladus Life Finder ( ELF ) . These mission , however , could take more than a ten to design and launching . Milner want to get there sooner .
The idea is still in its early stages , so there are n’t any concrete ideas yet . It could be a flyby mission , which swung through the plume once or several sentence . Or it could be an orbiter , which would take a bit longer to perform an intricate saltation to get into orbit around Saturn or Enceladus .
" There are different mind float around on how do we send a mission to Enceladus to basically do a more thorough investigation of the feather , to see if maybe there are some amino Zen there , or something of that nature , that would be sort of a smoke gas pedal for life below the ice , " he said .
" How can we , for the first fourth dimension ever , design and broadcast and launch a privately funded interplanetary science mission ? So that ’s what we are thinking about . "
Milner did n’t elaborate on the plan , so we do n’t know any sort of time scale just yet . But when it comes to searching for life in the Solar System , maybe a Russian billionaire might provide the spark we need .
