Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2014
The Cassini spacecraft imaged Saturn's small moon Prometheus in April 2013, and on the image captured a disturbance in Saturn's A-ring.
The disturbance is thought to be the sign of a small icy body orbiting near the edge of the ring.
The object, informally known as Peggy is thought to be about a kilometer across and might give clues to how the icy moons of Saturn formed, but also more importantly how the planets in the Solar system formed in the accretion disk around the Sun, and how they then migrated further away from their birthplaces.
Although the possibility of a new icy object has been known for some time, the science article was published online in the end of March 2014 and the details of observations on April 14th, 2014.
The scientists hope that they might get more information about Peggy in the end of 2016, when Cassini will move closer to Saturn's rings, and might make it possible to directly image Peggy. At this time Cassini is too far away to see such a small object, the presence of which can only be guessed by the gravitational disturbances in Saturn's rings.
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| Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute |
The disturbance is thought to be the sign of a small icy body orbiting near the edge of the ring.
The object, informally known as Peggy is thought to be about a kilometer across and might give clues to how the icy moons of Saturn formed, but also more importantly how the planets in the Solar system formed in the accretion disk around the Sun, and how they then migrated further away from their birthplaces.
Although the possibility of a new icy object has been known for some time, the science article was published online in the end of March 2014 and the details of observations on April 14th, 2014.
The scientists hope that they might get more information about Peggy in the end of 2016, when Cassini will move closer to Saturn's rings, and might make it possible to directly image Peggy. At this time Cassini is too far away to see such a small object, the presence of which can only be guessed by the gravitational disturbances in Saturn's rings.