According to a study, Saturnian moon Enceladus is hiding a global ocean underneath its icy crust, which has increased its chances of harboring life. Peter Thomas, lead author of the study published online this week in the journal Icarus, said last year, a team of researchers began calculating Enceladus' rotational wobble using data obtained over 10 years.

The study suggested that hydrothermal activity seeping out of Enceladus' South Pole tipped off researchers to the size of the ocean beneath the service.

Thomas, a Cassini spacecraft imaging team member at Cornell University, said, "It's all part of the tactic of trying to find the history of this object. Discovering that it is global instead of a local ocean gives you a chance to find out what the geology really means".

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint effort with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Originally, NASA has given $2.6 billion to the $3.26 billion mission. Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that the mission extensions are going to be an additional $580 million.

Cassini was launched in October 1997 and it reached Saturn in July 2004. Since then, it has been collecting scientific data. The mission has been extended two times and is expected to complete on September 15, 2017 once the spacecraft will kamikaze into Saturn for planetary protection.