New Saturn moon discovered: S/2007 S4, but, let’s call it Frank

William Atkins
Saturday, 21 July 2007 20:40

Science - Space

Microsoft Office 365

The discovery team, which includes Dr. Carl Murray from Queen Mary University, London, England, is formally called the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory For Operations (CICLOPS). Its website, which includes information on the discovery, is: http://ciclops.org/index.php?js=1.

Murray comments on the discovery and earlier discoveries with Cassini: “The Saturnian system continues to amaze and intrigue us with many hidden treasures being discovered the more closely we look. After initially detecting this extremely faint object, we carried out an exhaustive search of all Cassini images to date and were able to find further detections.” [Science and Technology Facilities Council]

Frank is located between the orbits of the Saturn moons Methone and Pallene, which are between the moons Mimas and Enceladus, respectively. It orbits the ringed planet of Saturn in just over one Saturnian day and has a diameter is around 1.1 miles (2 kilometers). Frank is composed mostly of rocks and ice. Because Frank, Methone, and Pallene all have similar orbit, scientists are surmising that they may be related to each other, possibily the result of a collision or a small group of objects that failed to form a larger moon.

The Cassini-Huygens mission was launched in 1997. When the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was launched, only 18 moons of Saturn had been discovered. Images from Cassini, along with Earth-based telescopes, have raised that number to sixty, and possibly more (with some still unconfirmed). Further information about the mission is found at the iTWire article “Cassini shows photographer’s eye with fantastic Saturn images”

Frank will probably not remain the moon’s name. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) gives new celestial bodies formal names, most likely a name from a figure from Greek mythology since Methone and Pallene are named after two of the seven daughters of Alkyoneus, who was killed by Hercules.

Author's note: It's too bad that Alkyoneus didn't name one of his daughters Frank. It's a catchy name for a moon!  And, how come we just use the name "Moon" for the Earth's moon? Maybe another catchy name like Bill or George, or even Sue, would be nice for its name. Somebody could even cash in on the name Johnny.