CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS

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Pan Alone

 

Saturn's innermost moon Pan, orbits the giant planet, seemingly alone in a ring gap its own gravity creates.

Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across) maintains the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring by gravitationally nudging the ring particles back into the rings when they stray in the gap. Scientists think similar processes might be in action during the formation of some planets.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 38 above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on May 3, 2014.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56 degrees. Image scale is 12 miles (19 kilometers) per pixel.

 

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Pan Alone
PIA 18281


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Alliance Member Comments
NeKto (Sep 10, 2014 at 11:12 AM):
is Pan's orbit resonant with other objects in the Saturn system?
like the image!

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