Monthly Meeting September – The hunt for oceans on icy moons

Could there be oceans (and even life) hiding beneath the icy surfaces of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn?

This month we will screen a rebroadcast of a Royal Institution Lecture.

For most of the history of planetary science, the search for habitable worlds focused on planets close to the Sun, where surface water can stay liquid. But data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft at Saturn and the Galileo spacecraft at Jupiter has overturned that assumption, revealing that several icy moons may be hiding vast oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen crusts.

In this Discourse, Michele Dougherty — the first female Astronomer Royal — takes us through the Cassini mission’s most extraordinary discovery: a plume of water vapour erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus, and what it revealed about the possibility of life beyond Earth. She then looks ahead to ESA’s JUICE mission, launched in 2023, which is now on its way to spend years studying Jupiter’s giant moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa — all suspected to hide oceans of their own.

About the speaker:
Michele Dougherty is Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. In 2025 she was named Astronomer Royal — the first woman to hold the position since it was created in 1675. Her research centres on planetary magnetospheres and atmospheric composition. She is a Principal Investigator on NASA’s Cassini mission at Saturn and on ESA’s JUICE mission, which will place the first spacecraft in orbit around a moon other than our own, Jupiter’s Ganymede. She is Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and was made CBE in the 2018 New Year Honours.