The Moon Mimas from Saturn Beneath its ice and craters it hides a secret. According to the Cassini probe, there is a layer of ice between 20 and 30 kilometers thick underneath an ocean of liquid water.
Furthermore, this ocean would have formed “recently,” to be more precise less than 25 million years. This discovery makes Mimas one of the most attractive points when it comes to studying the origins of living organisms, since the first creatures to form on Earth emerged from the first seas that formed billions of years ago.
Astronomer Valery Lainey says in the journal Nature that, at first glance, this moon “the most unlikely place of the solar system in search of liquid water” as it appears to be an “ancient and inactive place with a huge number of craters”.
Mimas will be the smallest of our solar system’s five moons with convincing evidence of subsurface oceans Enceladus and Titan of Saturn and Europe and Ganymede from Jupiter, Lainey added. There are also suspicions that there are subsurface oceans on some other moons, including Callisto of Jupiter.
Cassini observations of Mimas’ icy surface revealed no deformations that would suggest the existence of an ocean beneath. However, researchers noted that certain aspects of its orbit could only be explained by the presence of an inner oceanno solid interior.
The most iconic feature of Mimas is the Herschel Crater, which extends up to a third of its surface, making it resemble the crater Star of Death from the “Star Wars” film saga. Earth’s moon is about 2,000 times more massive than Mimas.
The liquid water in Mimas accounts for more than half of this moon’s total volume, if only between 1.2 and 1.4% of the amount in the Earth’s oceans.