PISCES: Plumes and Ices Simulation Chamber for Enceladus and icy moonS

Vast subsurface oceans buried under kilometers of ice crust have been discovered in our Solar System's icy moons and have sparked worldwide interests in ascertaining their potential habitability. The tell-tale signs that betray their presence on their hosts are mostly related to density and gravitational field measurements. In the case of Saturns moon Enceladus however, the Cassini space probe has observed supersonic plumes of water vapour and ice particles spewing from a fractured area of the South Polar Terrain called the "tiger Stripes", with later analysis of their composition confirming the presence of liquid water below the surface. While the plumes mechanisms are now well-understood as a whole, some areas remain unclear such as the link between icy particles nuclei composition and their origin and evolution from the subsurface ocean. As future missions will renew contact with Enceladus and explore its mysteries in the coming decades, we need experimental studies to best prepare for those. These studies will help with mission planning, instruments choice and tests and making sure we will harvest the best scientific return from the observations made. In this paper we present a new experimental setup called the Plumes and Ices Simulation Chamber for Enceladus and icy moonS, or PISCES for short. It is designed to emulate the environmental conditions (pressure, temperature) at the surface and interior of icy moons to experimentally study the processes that occur there using a wide range of sensors and instruments. We first describe the vacuum chamber setup and the range of sensors and instruments it can interface with. To showcase the setup's capabilities, we will then proceed to detail some of the plumes experiments we've run. Using 3D-printed cylindrical channels of various shapes and profiles and mounting them atop a liquid water reservoir placed in the vacuum chamber, we can investigate a wide range of plumes and link the plumes behaviour (vent velocity, temperature or particle size) to subsurface characteristics e.g. wall temperature, width, length or expansion ratio. By steadily increasing the complexity of the models used, we aim to experimentally replicate the icy plumes of Enceladus under analogous conditions using the PISCES setup will be a pioneering achievement this new area of research.