Discovery of Pandora

Pandora is a small moon of Saturn, discovered in October 1980 in images from the Voyager 1 spacecraft by a team including Stewart Collins. It orbits just outside the narrow F ring and, together with the moon Prometheus on the inner side, shepherds that ring, with the two moons' gravity helping to confine its particles. Their interactions with the ring produce streaks, gaps and kinks that were studied closely by the Cassini spacecraft. Pandora is irregularly shaped, about eighty kilometers across, and has a low density, suggesting that it is a loose pile of ice with some rock. It is named after Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, who opened the jar from which evils were released.

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