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Outwardly, Saturn’s moon Mimas appears to be a frozen solid block of ice and rock. And with the help of the data from the Cassini mission, Alyssa Rhoden from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and her team wanted to prove it too. Ultimately, however, the measurement results pointed in a completely different direction, as the working group writes in “Icarus”: Like Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus, Mimas could also have an inner ocean beneath the thick ice crust. It would thus be another celestial body in our solar system that has such an ocean.
“Because the surface of Mimas is badly scratched, we thought it was just a frozen block of ice,” says Rhoden. “Moons with interior oceans like Enceladus and Europa tend to be rugged and show other signs of geological activity. But the surface of Mimas has deceived us.« He could thus represent a new class of small, »cloaked« ocean worlds with surfaces that do not reveal the existence of this ocean.
Rhoden’s team developed a model to explain these differences: The heat generated by orbital and rotational energy is accordingly conducted into the depths by tidal forces. This heating inside the moon must be great enough to keep the ocean from freezing. But it is also small enough to maintain a thick ice shell. From their calculations, Rhoden and Co conclude that this tank is 24 to 31 kilometers thick.
The team also found that the flow of heat from the surface was very sensitive to the thickness of the ice shell, which could be checked by a spacecraft. The Juno space probe is supposed to fly past the icy moon Europa and use its microwave radiometer to measure the heat flows on this moon of Jupiter. The data can then be used to deduce how the heat flow affects the ice envelopes of ocean worlds like Mimas.
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