We’re Going To Enceladus (Maybe)! ESA’s Plans For Alien-Hunting Mission To Land On Saturn’s Moon Is A Go

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is currently the best place to look for life elsewhere in the Solar System. We don't know if this distant work is habitable, but it has several characteristics that make us hopeful. Excitingly, the European Space Agency has just announced it's going ahead with a unique mission to find that answer for good. 

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Enceladus is smaller than our moon and has little atmosphere, but what’s special is inside. Under its icy crust, Enceladus hides a liquid ocean. Observations from the Cassini mission have proven not only that, but also shown evidence of geothermal activity and interesting chemistry. Cassini could do that because droplets of the ocean are sprayed out by plumes at the South Pole of Enceladus. 

IFLScience has been reporting from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Ministerial Council for 2025 in Germany this week. This is where the decisions, budget, and priorities for ESA's next three years are being made, and mark a significant stage in the implementation of ESA's Strategy 2040. Among the missions is a visit to Enceladus as part of the Voyage 2050 strategy. 

Enceladus is the one place where we can actually touch the water from the ocean, and that for me is absolutely amazing.

Dr Jörn Helbert

The plan is bold. A solar-powered double mission, involving an orbiter and a lander that will be assembled in orbit with two launches. The lander will touch down in the region of the Tiger Stripes, where the plumes escape. Thanks to those geysers, we can probe the deep ocean directly and discover what’s in there without having to drill through the many kilometers of the icy crust.

“Enceladus is the one place where we can actually touch the water from the ocean, and that for me is absolutely amazing,” Dr Jörn Helbert, Head of the Solar System Section for ESA's Science Engagement Office, told IFLScience.

The inclusion of the mission in the current strategy shows that ESA is serious about it. Due to orbital alignments, the best time to arrive at the surface of Enceladus will be in 2052, with the lander ready to operate for a month. That’s when the icy moon gets plenty of sunshine (relatively speaking) and fewer eclipses. So, the double spacecraft won’t launch until the 2040s, but the work for it starts now, as the official confirmation and adoption of the mission plan has to be by 2034.

Enceladus is an exciting plan, but it is far from the only mission on the cards. Among ESA's current space observing fleet are Solar Orbiter, delivering the first images from the poles of the Sun; Euclid, studying the dark universe; BepiColombo, on its way to Mercury; Juice, on its way to Jupiter; PROBA-3, creating eclipses on command; and CHEOPS, which is studying known exoplanets around nearby bright stars. 

These missions will be joined by more probes and telescopes. PLATO, launching next year, and ARIEL, launching in 2029, will expand the number of known terrestrial exoplanets and provide crucial insights into their atmospheric properties. EnVision will travel to Venus early next decade and will provide the most complete view of Earth's "evil twin" that we have. 

[T]hose of us who have wondered, looking into the night sky, are we alone? Is there life out there? We might get an answer. It's pretty exciting.

Alexander Gerst, ESA astronaut

For fans of pristine comets or interstellar objects like Comet 3I/ATLAS, the mission to look out for is Comet Interceptor, which will be placed in orbit ready to chase after one of those objects the next time one comes close. ESA is also stepping up its presence on Mars, with the Rosalind Franklin rover, which will look for biosignatures on the Red Planet following its launch in Autumn 2028, after a series of delays.

“We will send a rover to Mars that drills 2 meters deep into the Martian surface, maybe finding out whether there are signs, traces of life out there. So, you know, those of us who have wondered, looking into the night sky, are we alone? Is there life out there? We might get an answer. It's pretty exciting,” ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst told IFLScience.

There are plans to look further into the universe, too. NewAthena is an X-ray observatory with unprecedented resolution, which is expected to receive final approval in 2027. Arrakihs will study the effect of dark matter on nearby galaxies. 

“New Athena is one of those scientific missions that's been proposed and it will be studying some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe,” ESA astronaut Rosemary Coogan told IFLScience. “I'm really excited to see that. I know I'm an astronomer at heart. I've studied black holes as part of my master's thesis. I think it's going to be fantastic to see that!”

In the middle of the next decade, ESA will launch LISA, which will measure gravitational waves from space at frequencies we have not seen before. This will allow us to observe events we have not seen before in gravitational waves, such as the collision between supermassive black holes, white dwarf binaries, and even planets around those binaries. It will independently measure the expansion of the universe, and so much more.

“This is the first time in more than 10 years that I have managed to increase the science budget significantly. So we are increasing it by more than 10% over the next three years, plus inflation. This is very important but what we do with it is: we build some of the most incredible missions that observe our universe,” ESA Director General Dr Josef Aschbacher told IFLScience. 

The strategy has also consolidated plans for more missions. The first one to be selected will be in a few months, and it will between three finalists: M-MATISSE (Mars – Magnetosphere, Atmosphere, Ionosphere and Space-weather Science), Plasma Observatory, and Transient High Energy Survey and Early Universe Surveyor (THESEUS). 

ESA has taken a bold stance in committing to cutting-edge science exploration in space, and while it will take a while to get to Enceladus and a few more years for Franklin to have its wheels on Mars, the answer to one of the most important questions in science – if we are alone in the universe – might not be too far off.