Saturn’s retinue: 60 and counting
By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have discovered yet another satellite of Saturn, bringing to 60 the number of moons around the ringed planet. The Cassini spacecraft spied the roughly 2-kilometer-wide body in images taken May 30.
Residing 197,700 km from Saturn, the moon orbits between Methone and Pallene, two 4-km-wide moons that were discovered by the craft soon after its arrival in July 2004. The grouping of these three objects suggests that they might be either the leftovers of a collision or a collection of icy objects that failed to coalesce into a larger moon, says Cassini scientist Carl Murray of Queen Mary, University of London.