Mountain Views News          Saturday, September 19, 2015

15

THE WORLD AROUND US

 Mountain Views News Saturday, September 19, 2015 


SATURN’S MOON ENCELADUS HOSTS A GLOBAL OCEAN


Every square inch of Saturn’s small moon 
Enceladus overlies a potentially habitable ocean. 
Observations of Enceladus’ slight wobble as it 
orbits Saturn can only be explained if the outer 
crust floats freely from the inner core, according 
to scientists studying images taken by NASA’s 
Cassini spacecraft. This means there is a globe-
spanning ocean beneath Enceladus’ icy surface.

 Enceladus has been a prime location for studying 
the potential for life in the solar system for the past 
decade, since Cassini found in 2006 a fine spray 
of water vapor, icy particles, and simple organic 
molecules erupting from fractures near Enceladus’ 
south pole. Measurements of the saltiness of geyser 
particles in 2009 proved that they must emanate 
from a liquid reservoir, and a 2014 analysis of 
Enceladus’ gravitational pull on the Cassini 
spacecraft demonstrated that the liquid reservoir 
is at least a regional sea underlying the entire south 
pole region. The new results—derived using an 
independent line of evidence based on Cassini’s 
images—prove that that regional sea is a widening 
of a global ocean. This discovery is published 
online in the journal Icarus.

 “This exciting discovery expands the region 
of habitability for Enceladus from just a regional 
sea under the south pole to all of Enceladus,” 
said Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating 
scientist at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, 
California, and a coauthor of the paper. “The 
global nature of the ocean likely tells us that it has 
been there for a long time, and is being maintained 
by robust global effects, which is also encouraging 
from the standpoint of habitability,” he said.

 The discovery was made through a combination 
of imaging, dynamical modeling, and statistical 
analysis. “This was a hard problem that required 
years of observations, and calculations involving 
a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are 
confident we finally got it right,” said Peter 
Thomas, a Cassini imaging team member at 
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and lead 
author of the paper.

 Enceladus has a tiny, but measurable wobble 
as it orbits Saturn. The icy moon is not perfectly 
spherical, and because it goes slightly faster and 
slower during different parts of its orbit, Saturn 
pulls and pushes the small moon back and forth as 
it rotates.

 Tiscareno developed a series of dynamical models 
of this wobble, technically called a libration, and 
Thomas’s group then tested each model against 
hundreds of Cassini images, taken of Enceladus’ 
surface at different times and from different angles, 
to find the best fit to the observations with extreme 
precision. The team plugged their best-fit value for 
the wobble into different models for how Enceladus 
might be arranged on the inside, including ones 
where the moon was frozen from surface to core.

 “If the surface and core were rigidly connected, 
the core would provide so much dead weight that 
the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it 
to be,” said Tiscareno, “This proves that there must 
be a global layer of liquid separating the surface 
from the core,” he said.

 The geysers deliver samples from this ocean to 
the surface regularly, which makes Enceladus a 
prime candidate in the search for life beyond Earth. 
Although a handful of worlds are now thought 
to have subsurface oceans, Enceladus joins only 
Jupiter’s moon Europa (which was recently selected 
as the destination of NASA’s next flagship mission) 
in having an extraterrestrial ocean that is known to 
communicate with its surface. 

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.

WHAT 
HAPPENS 
TO FORMER 
FOSTER YOUTH 
AFTER AGE 18?

By Laquetta Shamblee

It took 20-year old Destiny 
Nguyen more than two hours 
and several buses to travel to 
Journey House in Pasadena, the 
only place in Los Angeles County 
where she knew that former 
foster youth like her would be 
able to get some help to find housing. The July heat did 
not deter her from making the 43-mile trip from the shelter 
where she was residing in Santa Monica to arrive at her 
destination, the 103-year old craftsman home at the corner 
of Los Robles Avenue and Claremont Street. Established in 
1983, Journey House is a nonprofit organization whose sole 
purpose is to assist emancipated foster youth to meet their 
independent living needs.

Like thousands of former foster youth in California, at the 
ripe old age of 20, Destiny has the full responsibility for her 
shelter, food and other necessities of life. For her, there is 
no family to go to for support, financially or otherwise.

Her parents divorced when she was 10. She lived with her 
mother and grandparents, and as the oldest child in the 
home, she was given the responsibility of caring for her 
three younger cousins who were ages 13, 5 and 3 by the time 
Destiny was placed in kin-gap foster care right before her 
16th birthday. School officials had grown suspicious after 
seeing signs of physical abuse, and when a social worker 
from Department of Children and Family Services was sent 
to investigate, one of the neighbors revealed that she had 
witnessed Destiny being abused by her mother.

Fortunately, Destiny had always loved school and was very motivated when it came to her schoolwork. 
After being placed in foster care, she maintained a rigorous schedule, rising at 4:30am to catch the bus 
from El Monte to Lincoln Heights. She immersed herself into volunteering and usually got back home 
at about 9pm. Her hard work paid off and she graduated high school with a 4.0 and at the age of 18, she 
struck out on her own, moving into a subsidized apartment for former foster youth that she shared with 
a roommate.

After living there a short time, she had gotten three jobs and was working 72 hours a week. She worked 
full-time at a law office Monday thru Friday, evenings at a Chinese restaurant till 11pm and a part-time on 
the graveyard shift at Target. She was on a mission, building up her savings to pay cash for her dream car 
at the time, a Honda. Before she had put away the full amount to purchase her car, she suffered the tragic 
loss of a loved one and used her savings to pay for the funeral.

With no savings left and no family members to help, Destiny is focused on stabilizing her living situation 
and income. Her goal is to complete the required training to become a linguistic translator, for the courts 
and the United Nations. She already has a head start as a multi-lingual person of Vietnamese and Chinese 
descent who speaks six languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and a dialect of 
Cambodian).

Destiny never imagined that she would be counted among the foster youth who would come knocking to 
request assistance after aging-out of the foster care system. She shared that she loves to help others, but it 
is hard for her to ask for help. But after coming to meet with Journey House staff to get information about 
the support and referrals they have for housing and educational support, she expresses a sentiment that is 
typical among former foster youth who seek help, “I didn’t know this place existed. It feels like home, it’s 
so welcoming.”

To learn more about the Beyond Foster Care Campaign at Journey House and 
how you can help, visit: www.JourneyHouseYouth.org or call (626) 798-9478


CHRISTOPHER Nyerges

STORAGE WARS

[Nyerges is the author of “How to Survive Anywhere,” “Squatter in Los 
Angeles,” and other books. He has led wilderness expeditions since 1974. He 
can be reached at Box 41834, Eagle Rock, CA 90041, or www.SchoolofSelf-
Reliance.com.] 

One day I get a call out of the blue. 

 ”Do you know anything about solar ovens?”

 ”I suppose so,” I responded. “I’ve taught people how to make low-cost solar 
cookers for 20 or so years, and give the step-by-step process in my “How to Survive Anywhere” book.” 

 “We’re looking for a solar oven expert. Are you a solar oven expert?” asked the man on the phone. 
He identified himself as a producer with the Storage Wars show. This is a program where various 
individuals bid on the contents of storage units that the owners quit paying for. The show tracks each of 
the bidders to see what they get in the storage units. Sometimes they get junk, and sometimes they get 
some real interesting things. They hope that what they end up with is worth more than they bid on the 
unit. 

“ Have you ever seen the show,” the man asked me. 

 “Nope, I’ve never even heard of it.” The producer laughed. 

 “That’s OK,” he told me. “It sounds like you know about solar cookers.” He went on to explain that 
one of the stars of the show purchased the contents of a storage unit, and has an object that is believed 
to be a solar cooker. “We want you to look at it, on film, and tell him what he purchased.” 

 I said OK. 

 I explained to him that all of this could be done in about 10 minutes in my own backyard, but I was 
told that they wanted to do the segment in a more natural setting, preferably somewhere in the desert. 

 We agreed on a day, and a man in a fast car picked me up one morning and whisked me out to the 
desert, beyond Palm Springs, in a very wild-seeming area. 

 The star of the show, Ivy, rides up in his SUV, and we meet and greet, and we set up the box he 
brought me. I’d never seen that particular solar oven before, but it was a top-of-the-line Australian 
solar oven called the Sun Cook solar oven. I opened it and showed Ivy how to use it, and we even put 
some eggs and sausage into a pan to cook. 

 It was overcast when we started, but then the sky cleared as Ivy and I did a short walkabout, looking 
at the desert plants. 

 When we came back, the breakfast was done and we feasted on some sun-cooked food. 

 The Storage Wars show focuses on the dollar value of the items so I had to give him a dollar figure of 
what I thought the oven was worth. It was not new, but I estimated it could probably fetch $450 at Ivy’s 
secondhand store in the high desert, and $450 was a bit more than he paid for all the contents of the 
storage unit. 

 It was an enjoyable day. If you want to view it, go to http://youtu.be/Y-3sG0azfBU. My segment 
comes in at 20:53. 

SOLAR OVENS 

 Cooking with the sun is an ancient art. But modern solar ovens are quite another thing. At home, I 
have the American-made Sun Oven, which cooks about as fast as being on a gas oven if the day is hot 
and sunny. It easily gets up to 350 degrees f. temperature. 

 Simple low-cost solar ovens are easily made. I begin with a box that has a lid, such as the boxes where 
reams of paper are stored. I find a smaller box that goes into the bigger box, and I fill the space between 
the boxes with crumpled newspaper for insulation. I line the smaller inner box with tin foil, and then I 
cut a hole in the lid and secure a pane of glass to it. That’s really all there is to it, and this low-cost solar 
cooker doesn’t cook as quickly as a commercial model, but it still works well. [All the details can be 
found in my “How to Survive Anywhere” book, available anywhere.]


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