The best picture of Saturn's UFO-like satellite

Saturn's small Pan satellite with a thin ice rim surrounds it, creating an image of an alien flying saucer.

This small flying saucer flies around Saturn, hidden inside the rings of the planet, and NASA's probe has captured the most impressive image of this strange celestial body.

This flying saucer is actually a small satellite called Pan , which has been captured in great detail by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on March 7.

One of Pan's new photos taken by Cassini.(Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech).

When seeing the image of Pan for the first time, scientist Carolyn Porco at the Cassini mission said it was the embodiment of an artist.

Named after the Greek god of flute playing in the wild, Pan is 33.8 km wide and is called a controlled satellite . It is in the area of ​​Saturn's belt A, the farthest icy belt of the planet. When moving around Saturn, Pan constantly wiped out debris in the belt by sucking these dust particles and pushing away other dust particles, like a miniature vacuum cleaner powered.

In fact, the lack of fragments here made scientists predict Pan's existence in the early 1980s. However, this small satellite was not officially discovered until 1990, when Mark Showalter and his colleagues looked at images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft and found the satellite that existed in this space.

Now, when the Cassini spacecraft skips the system of Saturn's satellites, scientists have had the opportunity to observe Pan close-up. Previous images show that it is a walnut-shaped object.

Another view shows Pan's equatorial plate taken by Cassini.(Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech).

Recent images show more detail, that satellites are surrounded by a disk, called an equator accretion disk ; is a thin and smooth layer of matter particles attached to the equator of Pan with its weak gravity.

"This is far removed from the insignificant dots that I followed in 1990 through Voyager images. It was great to finally see the Pan satellite view , " said Showalter from the Institute. SETI in California, said.

In a 2007 study published in the journal Science, Porco proposed that the thin disk had been formed long before the material-absorbing satellite of Saturn's belt.

"Its distinctive shape, as everyone else sees, was created because it probably wiped out particles from Saturn's belt. These rings are very thin when compared to the size of Pan. therefore the accretion dust particles around its equator, " explains Showalter.

Pan is not the only case with a strange shape, another small satellite, Atlas, has a similar shape for a similar reason.