Voyager 1 photographed Saturn’s moon Pandora during its 1980 Saturn encounter. The spacecraft flew past Saturn in November 1980, before Voyager 2 made its own Saturn flyby the following year.
Pandora’s discovery history is easy to mix up because Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 both visited the Saturn system. Voyager 1 images led to the moon’s discovery, while Voyager 2 later photographed and studied it in greater detail during its 1981 encounter.
Pandora is a shepherd satellite of Saturn’s F ring. Its neighboring shepherd, Prometheus, was also identified through Voyager-era observations. The two moons help confine and shape the narrow ring, whose appearance changes over time because of their gravitational effects.
Cassini later provided much more extensive observations of Saturn and its moons, but it was not the spacecraft that discovered Pandora. Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004, decades after Voyager 1’s encounter.