Ocean spray freezes on its way out
Enceladus ejects icy plumes through fissures near its south pole. Cassini flew through those plumes and measured particles carrying salts and organic compounds from the buried ocean. A new analysis combines those spacecraft data with laboratory experiments and models to follow what happens between an ocean droplet and the grain that reaches space. The droplets appear to freeze slowly as water vapour carries them through the ice shell. Dissolved material can move into different parts of each droplet during freezing. Collisions with the fissure walls then break the frozen droplets into much smaller pieces, so a final grain need not contain the same mixture as the original ocean spray.[1], [2]