The planet Saturn has a large number of moons. It has big moons, small moons and uneven potato-shaped moons.
The second innermost moon of Saturn is Pan, which is walnut-shaped and very small in size. But the way NASA’s Cassini captured it, it looks huge.
The moon ‘Pan’ orbits within the Encke Gap in Saturn's A Ring. It is considered a ring shepherd and is responsible for keeping the Encke Gap free of ring particles.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 2, 2016, that shows how this smallest moon holds open the Encke gap and shapes the ever-changing ringlets within the gap.
NASA released this image taken by Cassini, which just entered the final year of its Saturn mission on Monday.
The image was taken in early July from a distance of 840,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) away from the planet.
Saturn with different moons
As per NASA report, the view in the image looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ring plane.
Image scale is 5 miles (8 kilometers) per pixel. Pan has been brightened by a factor of two to enhance its visibility, NASA added.
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