The Cassini space probe has been sending back great information about Saturn and its rings and moons and just gave us another great piece of video. The video revealed a new moon in hidden in gas giant’s outer ring.
The previously unseen moon, first spotted on May 1, 2005, makes the second moon located in a ring of Saturn. Scientists monitoring this new information are anxious to observe what effects this little moon could have on the ring it’s in.
“The obvious effect of this moon on the surrounding ring material will allow us to determine its mass and test our understanding of how rings and moons affect one another,” said Dr. Carl Murray, imaging team member from Queen Mary, University of London. An estimate of the moon’s mass, along with a measure of its size, yields information on its physical makeup. For instance, the new moonlet might be quite porous, like an orbiting icy rubble pile. Other moons near the outer edge of Saturn’s rings — like Atlas, Prometheus and Pandora — are also porous. Whether a moon is porous or dense says something about how it was formed and its subsequent collision history.
The images show the tiny object in the center of the Keeler gap and the wavy patterns in the gap edges that are generated by the moon’s gravitational influence. The Keeler gap is located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) inside the outer edge of the A ring, which is also the outer edge of the bright main rings. The new object is about 7 kilometers (4 miles) across and reflects about half the light falling on it — a brightness that is typical of the particles in the nearby rings.
“It’s too early to make out the shape of the orbit, but what we’ve seen so far of its motion suggests that it is very near the exact center of the gap, just as we had surmised,” said Dr. Joseph Spitale, imaging team associate and planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. The new moonlet orbits approximately 136,505 kilometers (84,820 miles) from the center of Saturn. More Cassini observations will be needed to determine whether the moon’s orbit around Saturn is circular or eccentric.
For More Information about this great new find and others regarding the probe, go to their website.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
