Pandora is a moon of Saturn and acts as a shepherd satellite of Saturn’s F ring.
Voyager 1 images revealed Pandora in 1980, and astronomers identified it as an outer shepherd of the narrow, dynamic F ring. Its gravitational influence helps shape the ring’s material, working with the nearby moon Prometheus. The pairing is an intentional mythological reference: Pandora and Prometheus are connected in Greek mythology.
Pandora is an irregular, small body rather than a spherical major moon. It has a heavily cratered surface and an elongated shape. Its orbit lies just outside Prometheus, and the two moons interact gravitationally with the ring particles.
The name can cause confusion because Pandora is also the name of a mythological woman, an asteroid, and several fictional characters. In planetary science, the relevant object is Saturn’s moon. Its discovery and role in the F ring made it especially important to studies of ring dynamics.