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Planetary science

Shepherds of Saturn's ring

Saturn's F ring is chaperoned on both sides by the tiny moons Prometheus and Pandora. Numerical simulations show that this celestial ballet can result from the collision of two aggregates that evolved out of Saturn's main rings.

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Figure 1: The F ring and its two shepherd moons, Pandora and Prometheus, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft.

© NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

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Correspondence to Aurélien Crida.

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Crida, A. Shepherds of Saturn's ring. Nature Geosci 8, 666–667 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2512

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