I have been getting email about a potentially "huge" NASA announcement scheduled for 2:00 p.m. today (Eastern) . It was originally broken by a Florida news station (the link may be down due to its getting slammed), but it looks as if this is somewhat overblown.
Keith Cowing at NASAWatch.com looked into it earlier(being on the west coast puts me behind other investigators, dagnappit) and he says that this may be a case of someone in the media getting overzealous, and the story snowballed. The story is about plumes of what is possibly water from geysers on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, which would be pretty cool — liquid water is not definitively known to exist anywhere else in the solar system but here (Europa’s undersurface ocean is inferred, and probably real, but not directly detected) (the image at the top of this post shows one such plume back in November 2005). Liquid water on another body in the solar system really is amazing stuff!
So while this is a pretty interesting story to say the least, it’s not enough to cause quite the hubbub it has in the media. So what’s going on? It turns out that in their announcement, the Florida news station talked about "possible life in our solar system" which is certainly jumping a very large gun and is not at all a warranted from the scientific claims in the press release.
We’ll see what’s what in a few hours, I suppose. In the meantime, Keith at NASAWatch makes an excellent point in his article: clearly the media, and the public, think that looking for life is big news. So why is NASA gutting the astrobiology budget ?