The Cassini-Huygens space probe discovered two new moons around Saturn, which could be the smallest spotted to date around the ringed planet, Nasa officials said on Tuesday.
The moons — measuring 3km and 4km in diameter — are located 194 000km and 211 000km respectively from Saturn.
”One of our major objectives in returning to Saturn was to survey the entire system for new bodies,” said Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader at the Boulder, Colorado-based Space Science Institute.
”We can now add the confirmation of two new moons, unnoticed around Saturn for billions of years until now,” she said.
The moons were identified by Sebastien Charnoz of France, a planetary dynamics specialist, along with Andre Brahic of the University of Paris, who was part of the imaging team, Nasa said.
The craft, made up of a United States-built orbiter (Cassini) and a European-built probe (Huygens), embarked on a seven-year, 3,5-billion-kilometre voyage to explore Saturn.
The US contribution was $2,6-billion and the European Union’s was $660-million. The Italian Space Agency supplied the probe’s high-gain antenna, which channels all communications with Earth.
Cassini-Huygens is the first man-made object to orbit the ringed planet, the sixth planet from the sun and second in size after Jupiter.
The probe is named after Jean-Dominique Cassini, a 17th-century Paris Observatory director who discovered several of Saturn’s moons and detected space between its rings, and 17th-century Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens, who first observed Saturn’s rings. — Sapa-AFP