The Cassini space probe may have found water on Saturn's moon Enceladus, NASA said Thursday.

"NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt" like geysers in the United States' Yellowstone park, it said in a statement.

High-resolution images snapped by the orbiting Cassini "show icy jets and towering plumes ejecting large quantities of particles at high speed," said the U.S. space agency, adding that "the jets might be erupting from near-surface pockets of liquid water above 0 degrees Celsius".

"We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold, " said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms," Porco said.

Scientists said the type of evidence of water found on Enceladus is different from previous findings on other moons in the solar system, which show liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust. Mission scientists report this and other Enceladus findings in this week's issue of Science.

Saturn is about 1,288 million km from Earth. Enceladus is about 505 km in diameter.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Cassini was launched in 1997 and went to orbit around Saturn in 2004.

Cassini made three flybys of Enceladus last year and is expected to fly within 350 km of the moon in 2008.

Source: Xinhua