This is one of Cassini's closest views to date of Saturn's F ring shepherd
moon Pandora. At least one crater is visible on the surface of this moon,
which is thought to be an icy rubble pile, loosely bound together by
gravity. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across.
Several of Saturn's ring moons, including Pandora, show elongated,
oval-like shapes (see PIA07523) with
their long axes oriented along the moon-Saturn line. In this view,
Cassini is looking at the side of Pandora facing away from Saturn. The
image shows the moon's leading hemisphere (although, as mentioned,
Pandora is not actually round). To the right, much of the moon's surface
is in shadow.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 20, 2005, at a distance of approximately
346,000 kilometers (215,000 miles) from Pandora and at a
Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel. The view was
magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility of
the moon's surface.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org.
