Saturn’s little system hit a big milestone this week with the announcement of its 60th moon. This new moon joins the crop of new satellites turned up by researchers poring through data sent back by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
The newly discovered moon first appeared as a faint dot in a series of images captured by Cassini on May 30. The discoverers, from Queen Mary, University of London, then went back through the vast library of Cassini images, verifying that they had found a new object.
Codenamed “Frank” for now, the new moon is only about 2 km (1.2 miles) across, and it’s mostly made of ice and rock. It’s located in between the orbits of Methone and Pallene.
This is the fifth new moon discovered by the Cassini imaging team.
Original Source: Cassini-Huygens News Release
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too…
It’s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at…
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns…