ejecta

What Enceladus does is akin to a volcano hurling lava into space -- except the ejecta are plumes of water vapor and ice.

It was long thought that high-speed collisions pulverized the comet ejecta, but now a 45-member team of researchers reports, in a paper published online in the journal Icarus this week, that heat is to blame.

"To create these ions that we observed in the ejecta, it was clear that there had to be a source of high-energy radiation in the center of the SN 1987A remnant," Fransson said.

The supernova’s ejecta expands in an “hourglass shape” as it impacts this disk.

“It could have gone really badly. They could have had the vehicle destroyed on the launchpad from ejecta hitting it.”