NASA’s Voyager 1 discovered Saturn’s moon Pandora in 1980.
Voyager 1 photographed Pandora during its flyby of Saturn in November 1980. Scientists initially identified the small object in images from the spacecraft and later confirmed it as a previously unknown moon. Pandora is an irregular, heavily cratered satellite with an average diameter of about 81 kilometres.
The moon is best known for its gravitational relationship with Saturn’s narrow F ring. Pandora orbits just outside the F ring and acts as one of its shepherd satellites, working with the inner moon Prometheus to help confine and shape the ring’s material. This role is why Pandora is sometimes compared with a cosmic shepherd rather than simply described as another moon.
Pandora is named after Pandora, the woman in Greek mythology associated with the container later called Pandora’s box. It is not the same object as asteroid 55 Pandora, which was discovered much earlier. Voyager 1’s Saturn encounter also produced important observations of the planet’s rings and many other satellites.