Frozen pee may be a practical reference point in our future search for life on Enceladus

In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft captured images of plumes of icy water erupting from Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. Subsequent flybys and sampling have suggested that this moon may be habitable by some form of life in its sub-surface ocean, thanks to geological heating. However, this is all inconclusive at this point, because Cassini wasn’t designed to tackle this kind of mission. Even when the spacecraft was flown through the moon’s icy geysers, it could only sample a limited portion of the ejected slush, since the probe could only detect one size of ice grain at a time. Now that Cassini has been crashed into Saturn, researchers are hoping to get another probe to Enceladus, but they need to make sure it’s ready for the job, and that means developing a better understanding of frozen water when it’s flushed into space.

In better tailor sensors for the icy ejecta of Enceladus, engineers would like experiment with, or at least observe, water as it flows into the cold vacuum of space. Of course, water is heavy and therefore expensive to get off the ground, plus astronauts value it as a way to stay, you know, alive. So rather than fly water up to space only to toss it out, it’s been proposed that we start paying closer attention to how wastewater from astronauts’ toilets as well as fuel cells, behaves when it’s vented from spaceships. Wastewater, or any water, spewed from a small metal tube wouldn’t be a perfect proxy for the vents of Enceladus, but it may be a starting point for measuring what kind if ice crystal distribution should be expected.

Previous work with purged pee

There’s also some precedent for these observations. In 1989, researchers used a telescope in Hawaii to watch as the space shuttle Discovery dumped water from its fuel cells. They couldn’t develop a full 3D model from these observations, but they could at least note that two sizes of ice grain formed. Bigger pieces of ice formed right out of the vent, while smaller grains, probably from recondensed water vapor, formed further away. The space shuttles also ejected liquid waste while on missions, although they made sure to keep the astronauts poop for later disposal back on Earth. Some of this vented liquid was found to form long icicles just outside the vents, suggesting another phenomenon that could be found on Enceladus.

While space shuttles dumped liquids more often, the International Space Station doesn’t quite provide the same opportunities to observe frozen pee. Pee isn’t sprayed into space as much anymore, partially due to the realization that frozen urine ejected from the Mir space station in the late 1980s had been slowly damaging the facility’s solar panels. Instead, most of the astronauts’ pee is cleaned and recycled into drinking water, leaving only the most concentrated, briny, urea to be purged into space. Astronauts’ poop doesn’t get tossed out either, but is instead packaged with other bundles of trash that are dropped into the natural incinerator that is the Earth’s atmosphere.

With these limitations, it’s not clear how much we’ll learn by watching astronaut’s waste water. At the very least, the stuff humans flush can at least provide a basic reference point for what to expect the next time we’re near Enceladus.

Source: Astronaut wee could show us how the plumes on Enceladus work by Leah Crane, New Scientist