In a stunning set of close-ups, Pan, a diminutive moon of Saturn, looks like a floating ravioli lost in space, or a wrinkled flying saucer. By refining the calculations, Showalter, then at the NASA Ames Research Center, figured out an orbit for the unseen moon. He went back to images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby of Saturn in 1981. “In the first image I looked at, there was Pan,” Showalter said. In April, it will aim at Atlas, yet another shepherd moon, which, in the blurrier images seen to date, also resembles a flying saucer.

Source: National Post March 10, 2017 20:37 UTC