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Pandora, Prometheus and the F-Ring
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Original NASA caption:"From just outside the faint edge of Saturn's F-Ring, the moon Pandora keeps watch over her fine-grained flock.
The outer flanks of the F-Ring region are populated by ice particles approaching the size of the particles comprising smoke!
As a shepherd moon, Pandora helps her cohort Prometheus confine and shape the main F-Ring (Pandora is 84 Km (such as 52 miles) across while Prometheus is 102 Km (such as 63 miles) wide and orbits interior to the F-Ring.
The small knot seen attached to the core is one of several that Cassini scientists are eyeing as they attempt to distinguish "embedded moons" from "transient clumps of material".
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Aug. 2, 2005, using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 930 nnmts at a distance of approx. 610.000 Km (such as about 379.000 miles) from Pandora and at a Sun-Pandora-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 146°. Image scale is 4 Km per pixel".
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