ALL THESE MOONS ARE YOURS: Privately Funded Team May Launch Life-Hunting Mission to Saturn Moon Enceladus.

Breakthrough Initiatives — a program founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner to hunt for alien life and help explore the cosmos — is considering launching a mission that would fly through the plume of water vapor and other material emanating from Enceladus’ south polar region, Milner said here yesterday (Nov. 9) at The Economist magazine’s inaugural global space summit, called “A New Space Age.”

NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft discovered the plume, and the 100-odd geysers that create it, in 2005. Subsequent observations by the probe revealed that these geysers are blasting stuff out from a potentially habitable ocean of salty liquid water that sloshes beneath the 313-mile-wide (504 kilometers) moon’s icy shell. [Photos of Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Blasting Moon]

The plume provides a way to sample this ocean without even touching down on Enceladus. Cassini flew through the plume repeatedly during its epic Saturn mission, which ended with a fiery plunge in September, but the probe was not outfitted with life-detection gear. So astrobiologists have been clamoring to go back.

“We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what’s going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch?” Milner said.

I hope the answer is “Yes.”