This Moon Has Oxygen... But You Can’t Breathe There: Rhea
Rhea looks like one of Saturn’s most ordinary moons. Frozen, heavily cratered, and seemingly lifeless. But in two thousand and ten, the Cassini spacecraft discovered something that changed how scientists think about one of the strongest possible signs of life: oxygen.
Far from the Sun, Rhea has a faint oxygen-bearing exosphere. Yet nothing is alive there to produce it. Energetic particles from Saturn’s magnetosphere strike the moon’s water ice, breaking apart molecules and creating oxygen through a process called radiolysis.
🌌 So why does this matter?
For decades, oxygen in another world’s…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.