Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft revealed that Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus expels active plumes of water vapor and ice grains through fractures in its south polar crust, fed by a subsurface liquid ocean. While previous flybys detected water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia within the plumes, planetary scientists remained uncertain whether the ocean contained soluble phosphorus, a critical element required for DNA, RNA, and cellular ATP synthesis. In a 2023 study, geochemist Frank Postberg and colleagues analyzed high-resolution spectra of ice grains captured by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer and identified abundant sodium phosphate salts. Because phosphorus concentrations in Enceladus’s ocean water were calculated to be at least 100 times higher than those in Earth’s oceans, the researchers suggest that
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Verbal·Information and Ideas·Inferences
easyWhich choice most logically completes the text?
A
the presence of phosphorus on Enceladus indicates that all life-detection criteria for its ocean have now been definitively satisfied.
B
high concentrations of dissolved phosphorus in Enceladus’s ocean eliminate one of the major suspected geochemical constraints on the habitability of that environment.
C
the ice grains detected in Enceladus’s plumes originated from surface impacts rather than hydrothermal interactions with the moon’s rocky core.
D
Enceladus lacks the thermodynamic energy sources required to sustain biological chemical reactions.