Nearly 400 years ago, Galileo looked at the Pleiades star cluster through his telescope and noticed that the seven or so ...

Enceladus is still frigid, but has lower radiation and better access windows than Europa. Whether the ice-walker gets a new lease on its semi-autonomous life remains to be seen.

For many years, scientists at NASA have been investigating the possibility of sending a lander of some type to either Enceladus or Europa—both have icy crusts that cover a liquid-water ocean.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. ...

Prioritizing Enceladus. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) identified a lander and orbiter mission to study Enceladus’s plumes as the second-highest priority in the ...

"Data from the lander's sampling devices, thermal drill, and the orbiter's remote sensing will provide comprehensive insights into the composition and formation of Enceladus's subsurface ocean.

Charity Phillips-Lander, ... Enceladus is particularly intriguing because it is believed to have a subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust, ...

These pores could form habitable niches for microbial life. Credit: Southwest Research Institute/Charity Phillips-Lander. Southwest Research Institute, supported by NASA ’s Habitable Worlds program, ...