Saturn's ocean-covered moon Enceladus constantly spews water into space through fractures in its icy crust. The Cassini spacecraft determined the composition of these jets in the mid-2000s and found molecules that included carbon dioxide and ammonia, both crucial to life on Earth. And now, in a study published Thursday in Nature Astronomy, scientists have reanalyzed the Cassini samples and revealed the great chemical diversity, making this icy little moon a prime candidate for finding alien life in our own solar system.

The study's lead author, Harvard University biophysicist Jonah Peter, was intrigued by previous findings that Enceladus was likely rich in organic compounds, most of which had not been identified. To discover the Moon's true chemical composition, Peter and his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reexamined data collected in 2011 and 2012 by the agency's Cassini-Huygens mission, which flew a spacecraft through the spectacular moon plumes several times. Enceladus water. The Cassini samples, analyzed by the mass spectrometer on board the spacecraft (an instrument that identifies compounds by their molecular weight), initially revealed five types of molecules in the jets: water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and molecular hydrogen.