Science / Medicine : NASA Scientist Finds New Moon in Saturn’s Rings

A new moon only 12 miles in diameter has been discovered orbiting the planet Saturn, NASA has announced. The tiny sphere was found by planetary scientist Mark Showalter of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View through analysis of pictures taken nine years ago by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The moon’s presence had been predicted because of a disturbance in a 200-mile-wide gap, called the Encke gap, in Saturn’s outermost major ring, the “A” ring. Scientists theorized that the gap resulted from the presence of an unseen body and determined that the moon’s gravity would disturb the particles in the huge ring, producing both the gap ring and waves along the ring’s inner edges.

Showalter used a computer program to analyze those waves, which resemble the wake of a motorboat, to determine the position and mass of the moon. The moon orbits 46,000 miles from Saturn’s surface, the most distant from the planet, and is the 18th moon to be discovered there.