Pan alone

Saturn's innermost moon Pan, orbits the giant planet, seemingly alone in a ring gap its own gravity creates.

Pan (28 kilometres across) maintains the Encke Gap in Saturn's A ring by gravitationally nudging the ring particles back into the rings when they stray in the gap. Scientists think similar processes might be in action during the formation of some planets.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini
spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 3 May 2014.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometres from Pan and at a Sun-Pan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56 degrees. Image scale is 19 kilometres per pixel.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.