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The Moon's orbit is inclined by several degrees relative to Saturn's, so occultations will only occur when Saturn is near one of the points in the sky where the two planes intersect (both the length of Saturn's year and the 18.6-Earth-year nodal precession period of the Moon's orbit influence the periodicity).
Pan is the innermost named moon of Saturn. [4] It is approximately 35 kilometres across and 23 km wide and orbits within the Encke Gap in Saturn's A Ring. Pan is a ring shepherd and is responsible for keeping the Encke Gap free of ring particles. It is sometimes described as having the appearance of a walnut, or raviolo. [5]
Saturn's satellite system is very lopsided: one moon, Titan, comprises more than 96% of the mass in orbit around the planet. The six other planemo ( ellipsoidal ) moons constitute roughly 4% of the mass, and the remaining small moons, together with the rings, comprise only 0.04%.
Launched in 1997, NASA's Cassini spacecraft entered Saturn's orbit seven years later and studied the planet until 2017. The mission was the first in-depth study of the planet, its rings and moons. ...
Phoebe is inclined by 5° with respect to Saturn's orbit plane (often written as 175°, due to Phoebe's retrograde orbital motion), and its resulting vertical excursions above and below the ring plane agree closely with the ring's observed thickness of 40 Saturn radii. The existence of the ring was proposed in the 1970s by Steven Soter. [161]
The moon was named in 2006 after Daphnis, a shepherd, pipes player, and pastoral poet in Greek mythology; [8] he was descendant of the Titans, after whom the largest moons of Saturn are named. Both Daphnis and Pan, the only other known shepherd moon to orbit within Saturn's main rings, are named for mythological figures associated with shepherds.
A deep ocean exists beneath the icy, cratered surface of Saturn’s moon Mimas, ... The moon takes a little more than 22 hours to orbit Saturn and is only about 115,000 miles (186,000 kilometers ...
Methone / m ɛ ˈ θ oʊ n iː / is a small, egg-shaped natural satellite of Saturn that orbits out past Saturn's ring system, between the orbits of Mimas and Enceladus.It was discovered in 2004, though it was not until 2012 that it was imaged in detail by the Cassini spacecraft.