The Cassini spacecraft detected warmth, water and organic chemicals, the basic ingredients for life on Saturn’s small moon, Enceladus, reinforcing scientists’ belief that our solar system has favorable conditions appropriate for living organisms to develop.

At a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, the scientists described observations made by the Cassini spacecraft when it flew at approximately 30 miles over the surface of Enceladus on March 12, with an astounding 15 kilometers per second speed as part of ongoing exploration of Saturn and its moons.

The spacecraft discovered a high density of water vapor and both simple and complex organic chemicals, as well as high temperatures which together could provide most of the prerequisites for life.

“Water vapor was the major constituent. There was methane present. There was carbon dioxide. There was carbon monoxide. There were simple organics and there were more complex organics. The composition of the plume is very much like the composition of a comet,” Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said at the briefing, according to Reuters.

Comets are believed to contain primordial materials leading many scientists think the objects might have seeded life on Earth.

Where did the organics come from? “Or course, natural gas comes from decaying biological matter on Earth. But this is not the conclusion we reached for Enceladus. Another possibility is the geochemistry going on in the interior can also produce organics,” Waite explained.

Scientists also said that detailed heat maps of the lunar surface revealed the south pole is warmer than previously thought, although still frigid at minus -135 degrees Fahrenheit (-93 degrees C).

The fact that heat is escaping through the tiger stripes suggests that it’s even warmer under the moon’s surface. “They’re still awfully cold, but much warmer than background temperatures of the rest of the surface. This means it has to be even warmer under the surface and raises the possibility of liquid water beneath the [exterior],” Cassini co-investigator John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said.

In conclusion, what Cassini found suggested Enceladus had significant astrobiological potential – potential for life – Waite said. “The organics are clearly in the abundance beyond that we expected.”

The Enceladus report comes just days after scientists said in a paper that Cassini had supplied evidence for the possible existence of a subsurface of water and ammonia on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.