Meet the real Pandora

The Cassini spacecraft's best close-up view of Saturn's F ring shepherd moon, Pandora, shows that it is coated in fine dust-sized icy material. Cassini took this image from a distance of 52,000 kilometres.

Pandora is one of over 60 moons that orbit Saturn. Discovered in 1980 in images taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the tiny potato-shaped world is just 110 x 88 x 62 kilometres.

Circling the ringed planet at a distance of just under 142,000 kilometres, it takes only 15.1 hours to complete one orbit.

Pandora, along with its sibling Prometheus, is a shepherd moon, orbiting just outside Saturn’s thin F ring. The gravitational influence of the two moons helps keep the material in the F ring in check.

The small moon’s surface appears to be covered in a layer of dust-sized particles of ice. There also are a number of craters, a couple of them being around 30 kilometres wide.

Two of Saturn's small moons orbiting beyond the planet's thin F ring—Pandora on the left and Epimetheus on the right.

An almost edge-on view of Saturn's rings, also showing Pandora and the giant ringed planet in the background.

Pandora casts its shadow upon the F ring.

Images courtesy NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute.

Get SpaceInfo.com.au daily updates by RSS or email! Click the RSS Feed link at the top right-hand corner of this page, and then save the RSS Feed page to your bookmarks. Or, enter your email address (privacy assured) and we’ll send you daily updates. Or follow us on Twitter, @spaceinfo_oz