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Cassini Captures Best Ever Images of Saturn's Tiny Moon Pan

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday March 09 2017, @10:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the next-up-tinkerbell dept.

takyon writes:

The Cassini spacecraft has imaged the dumpling/walnut/ravioli-shaped Pan, a shepherd moon in Saturn's Encke Gap with a mean radius of around 14.1 km:

Even as it nears a sad end in September, the Cassini spacecraft is continuing to delight as it makes some of its final orbits through the Saturn system. As part of these "ring-grazing" maneuvers, the spacecraft has just returned the best-ever images of the small, walnut-shaped moon Pan. [...] In earlier research, [Carolyn] Porco and other planetary scientists have suggested that Pan, as well as Daphnis and some of the other small moons in the Saturn system, were once denser cores that had about one-third to one-half their present size.

Also at NASA JPL, Science Magazine and The Verge.

Raw images.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Thursday March 09 2017, @10:23PM (2 children)

    by Subsentient (1111) on Thursday March 09 2017, @10:23PM (#477155) Homepage Journal
    It looks like a weird lumpy grey saturn itself, like a smushed clay model of Saturn made by a kid. :^3
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @07:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @07:20AM (#477285)

    A baby Saturn, how cute!
    Just don't grow up to be a Uranus like your dad.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 10 2017, @08:42AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday March 10 2017, @08:42AM (#477297) Homepage
    primed with the concept of ravioli, and then seing the picture on the wiki page, the first thing that went through my head was "nope, that's a pelmeni, you food ignoramuses"! (linguistic note - "ignoramus" the root word is 1st person plural (we ...), the latinate group 1 noun -us -> -i is a lookalike production that is completely inappropriate.)
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