It is the first time a spacecraft has captured direct evidence of an oxygen atmosphere at a world other than Earth.
The flyby measurements of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft at Saturn’s moon Rhea reveal a tenuous oxygen-carbon dioxide atmosphere.
The NASA-led international mission has revealed that the atmosphere of Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon is extremely thin. Moreover, it is sustained by high energy particles bombarding its icy surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions into the atmosphere.
If you’re anxious to get to Rhea and take a whiff – think twice!
The density of oxygen is probably about 5 trillion times less dense than in Earth’s atmosphere.
“The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said Ben Teolis, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and lead author of the newly released data carried in Science Express – an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it,” Teolis said in a press statement.
The Cassini spacecraft rode into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida on October 15, 1997 atop a U.S. Air Force Titan IVB booster.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.
For more information about the Cassini mission, visit:
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By LD/CSE