Key facts
- Scale fact
- 34.6 kmmaximum extent
- Mass
- ~4.3 trillion metric tons
- Temperature
- ~78 K surface
Pan
34.6 kmmaximum extent
Explore Pan to scaleVisual creditCassini 2017 / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Details
Pan is Saturn's innermost named moon, orbiting inside the Encke Gap in the A ring. Its gravity helps keep the gap open, while its broad equatorial ridge is thought to have accumulated from ring material.
Pan orbits inside the 325-kilometer-wide Encke Gap. Its gravity maintains the gap and gives nearby ring particles small kicks that organize them into waves and wakes. Those disturbances helped astronomers predict the moon’s location before Mark Showalter found it in archival Voyager 2 images in 1990.
Cassini later resolved the ridge around Pan’s equator. Imaging models indicate that the ridge accumulated after the central body formed, when material near the thin ring plane continued to fall onto the moon’s equator; the same ring environment that Pan perturbs therefore also helped shape it.
Links
- Wikipedia
- Pan on Wikipedia
Size neighbors
Objects near Pan on the scale
On the logarithmic size axis, Pan falls between 486958 Arrokoth and Atlas. The band uses nearby Shepherd moon records.
Shared physical scale
105km
Sources
References for Pan
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Pan — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (Cassini 2017 / NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute, Public domain)
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About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.