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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Cassini spacecraft has imaged [arstechnica.com] the dumpling/walnut/ravioli-shaped Pan [wikipedia.org], 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 [arstechnica.com] 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 [ciclops.org], [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 [nasa.gov], Science Magazine [sciencemag.org] and The Verge [theverge.com].

Raw images [nasa.gov].

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