New moon found in Saturn?s rings

The Cassini spacecraft has snapped pictures of a small moon it found tucked away in a gap in the outer ring of Saturn, scientists said on Tuesday.

The Cassini spacecraft has snapped pictures of a small moon it found tucked away in a gap in the outer ring of Saturn, scientists said on Tuesday.

HT Image

Cassini, a joint project of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, took a series of snapshots of the object on May 1, scientists at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado said in a statement.

A day later Cassini took an even closer picture of the moon that allowed scientists to estimate both its size and brightness.

The moon, identified for now as S/2005 S1, is about 7 km across and reflects about half of the light that hits it as it orbits about 137,000 km from the centre of Saturn, scientists said. The small moon is located about 250 km inside the outer edge of Saturn's bright main rings in an area known as the Keeler gap. Another Saturnian moon, Pan, also orbits the planet from within its rings and scientists believe there may be many others.

Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute, said in a statement that further study of those embedded moons and how they interact with rings that surround them the could yield clues about how other planets in the solar system were formed.