On Thursday, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) released mind-boggling images of an object near Saturn that looked like a sci-fi alien flying saucer.
Apparently, the UFO-like interplanetary thing is actually one of the many moons of Saturn, called Pan. NASA captured the photos through the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft during a flyby mission. Pan, for the record, is a tiny satellite with an average radius of 8.8 miles only.
NASA tweets photos of a Saturn moon
According to Geo News, people even compared the form of Pan to Ravioli, a type of dumpling, after NASA tweet the stunning images using Cassini's official account. First, Cassini-Huygens is a joint effort between the American, European, and Italian space agencies. The unmanned shuttle arrived in Saturn 13 years ago.
Per the same source, Cassini's mission will end on Sept 15 as it plunges down the planet's surface. NASA named that day as the "Grand Finale". Still, the amazing spacecraft will collect last bits of data like Saturn's gravitational pull and even pictures of the planet's rings.
Meanwhile, the recent photos of Pan were actually raw and unprocessed files. NASA got the pictures last March 7 in the closest distance of Cassini to the satellite of Saturn. The actual position of the shuttle was within 15, 268 miles of the 22-mile wide moon.
NASA: The reason for the odd shape of Saturn moon
According to KTLA5, NASA explained that Pan's weird form comes from a thing called equatorial ridge. The same characteristic is seen in another Saturn moon, Atlas. To further illustrate, these ridges were formed over time as these satellites orbit inside the planet's rings and amass wandering particles.
Preston Dyches, a spokesperson for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, explained the process of having an equatorial ridge. Pan, surprisingly, is just one of the 60 known moons of Saturn. It is also the closest with an orbit time of 13.8 hours.
Earlier, Cassini sent back images of Tethys and Mimas, Saturn satellites too that look like the Death Star from "Star Wars" On the other hand, Iapetus appears to be a humongous galactic walnut. Lastly, Titan, the only known space body in out solar system to hosts stable liquid bodies on its surface. Unfortunately, its lakes and seas are made of hydrocarbons and not water (H2O).
