A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn - bringing the planet's latest moon tally up to 60. The body was spotted in a series of images taken by cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft. Initial calculations suggest the moon is about 2km-wide and its orbit sits between those of two other Saturnian moons, Methone and Pallene.
The Cassini spacecraft is the first man-made satellite to orbit Saturn. The data and images it has gathered from its Cassini-Huygens mission has provided immense information that has solidified some old theories about the planet and established foundations for new ones.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=rkVAbaBPTTs] Image credits: NASA
In this video you'll go along Cassini's voyage and experience never-before-seen close-ups of Saturn's violent and stormy south pole, and see a more tranquil bluish north pole. The gaps within Saturn's rings are explained and the celestial bodies now known to exist there.
This false-colour mosaic was created from 25 images taken by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer over a period of 13 hours, and captures Saturn in night time and daytime conditions. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer acquires data simultaneously at 352 different wavelengths, or spectral channels. Data at wavelengths of 2.3, 3.0 and 5.1 microns were combined in the blue, green and red channels of a standard colour image, respectively, to make this false-colour mosaic.
Expand (154kb, 2500 x 1899) Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
This image was acquired on Feb. 24, 2007, while the spacecraft was 1.58 million kilometres from the planet and 34.6 degrees above the ring plane. The solar phase angle was 69.5 degrees. In this view, Cassini was looking down on the northern, unlit side of the rings, which are rendered visible by sunlight filtering through from the sunlit, southern face.