Scientists have just used NASAs Cassini spacecraft to take pictures of what everyone is calling space ravioli: Saturns moon Pan. The images were taken on March 7 during a flyby when it came with 15,268 miles of the moon, which is a mere 22 miles wide and is one of Saturns smallest moons.
Its the closest images ever taken of Pan, and they will help scientists understand the shape and geology of this cosmic body, NASA said in a statement. Saturn has more than 60 moons, and many of them are quite small like Pan with an odd shape. For example, Iapetus has a weird oblong shape due to an equatorial ridge, drawing comparisons to a walnut. And a huge crater in the moon Mimas makes it look like the death star.
Saturns moons fascinate scientists, and for many diverse reasons. Scientists want to take a closer look at the giant moon Titan, which is the only other cosmic body in the solar system other than Earth to have stable bodies of liquid on its surface, although the liquid is from hydrocarbons not water. And then theres Enceladus, which may hold an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface that scientists think may harbor life.
The statement from NASA follows below.
These raw, unprocessed images of Saturns tiny moon, Pan, were taken on March 7, 2017, by NASAs Cassini spacecraft. The flyby had a close-approach distance of 24,572 kilometers (15,268 miles).
These images are the closest images ever taken of Pan and will help to characterize its shape and geology.
Additional raw images from Cassini are available at NASAs website.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for the agencys Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Caltech in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.
Pan is seen in this color view as it sweeps through the Encke Gap with its attendant ringlets.
Pan, the innermost of Saturns known moons, has a mean radius of 8.8 miles (14.1 km) and orbits 83,000 miles (134,000 km) away from Saturn, within the Encke Gap of Saturns A-ring. As it orbits Saturn every 13.8 hours, it acts as a shepherd moon and is responsible for keeping the Encke Gap open. The gap is a 200 mile (325 km) opening in Saturns A ring.
Pan creates stripes, called wakes, in the ring material on either side of it. Since ring particles closer to Saturn than Pan move faster in their orbits, these particles pass the moon and receive a gravitational kick from Pan as they do. This kick causes waves to develop in the gap and also throughout the ring, extending hundreds of miles into the rings. These waves intersect downstream to create the wakes, places where ring material has bunched up in an orderly manner thanks to Pans gravitational kick.
Pan, like Saturns moon Atlas, has a prominent equatorial ridge that gives it a distinctive flying saucer shape.
Discovery Pan was discovered by M.R. Showalter in 1990 using images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft nine years earlier.
How Pan Got its Name Moons of Saturn were originally named for Greco-Roman Titans and descendants of the Titans. But as many new moons were discovered scientists began selecting names from more mythologies, including Gallic, Inuit and Norse stories.
Pan, a satyr (a creature resembling a man with the hind legs and hooves of a goat), is a Greek god of nature and the forest.
Here is what Wikipedia says about Pan.
The existence of a moon in the Encke Gap was first predicted by Jeffrey N. Cuzzi and Jeffrey D. Scargle in 1985, based on wavy edges of the gap which indicated a gravitational disturbance.[4] In 1986 Showalter et al. inferred its orbit and mass by modeling its gravitational wake. They arrived at a very precise prediction of 133,603 10 km for the semi-major axis and a mass of 5101012 Saturn masses, and inferred that there was only a single moon within the Encke gap.[5] The actual semi-major axis differs by 19 km and the actual mass is 8.61012 of Saturns.
The moon was later found within 1 of the predicted position. The search was undertaken by considering all Voyager 2 images and using a computer calculation to predict whether the moon would be visible under sufficiently favorable conditions in each one. Every qualifying Voyager 2 image with resolution better than ~50 km/pixel shows Pan clearly. In all, it appears in eleven Voyager 2 images.
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