In six flybys between December 2016 and April 2017, five cameras and spectrometers aboard Cassini were able to collect unprecedented data. The final phases of NASA's Cassini Saturn mission offered the opportunity to study these unique bodies, with diameters ranging between 8 and 120 kilometers, from close-up. Pandora and Epimetheus, both more potato- than ravioli-shaped, orbit Saturn outside the adjacent, much thinner and dustier F-ring. While Pan and Daphnis have cleared orbits for themselves within the A-ring, as is clearly visible even from Earth, Atlas is located at the outermost edge of this ring. Three of the innermost Saturnian moons, Pan, Daphnis, and Atlas, are bizarre worlds: With their ring-like bulge along the equator, they are reminiscent of cosmic ravioli. © NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute Monitoring of the moons’ charged particle environment yielded a surprise: a tightly confined accumulation of high energy electrons that forms a previously unknown micro-radiation belt in the region of the planet’s F ring. Shape, density, surface texture, and composition as well as the distribution of charged particles in the environment allow conclusions about the evolution of the ring moons. The results of these measurements are presented an article published this week in the journal Science by a team of researchers including the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. In the final months of NASA's Cassini mission, the space probe was able to take the most accurate look yet at five of these bizarre, partly ravioli-shaped bodies and the space environment to which they are exposed. Only slightly more than a handful of small, irregularly shaped bodies, so-called ring moons, are an exception. Most of Saturn's 62 moons orbit their giant planet at a great distance outside the main rings.
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