Cassini's best close-up view of Saturn's F ring shepherd moon, Pandora,
shows that this small ring-moon is coated in fine dust-sized icy material.
Craters formed on this object by impacts appear to be covered by debris, a
process that probably happens rapidly in a geologic sense. The grooves and
small ridges on Pandora (84 kilometers, or 52 miles across) suggest that
fractures affect the overlying smooth material.
The crisp craters on another Saturn moon, Hyperion, provide a contrasting
example of craters on a small object (see PIA07740).
Cassini acquired infrared, green and ultraviolet images on Sept. 5, 2005,
which were combined to create this false-color view. The image was taken
with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of
approximately 52,000 kilometers (32,000 miles) from Pandora and at a
Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 54 degrees. Resolution in the
original image was about 300 meters (1,000 feet) per pixel. The image has
been magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility.
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 operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at
http://ciclops.org.
