Pandora was discovered in photographs taken by Voyager 1 in 1980. It is a small inner moon of Saturn and functions as an outer shepherd satellite of the planet’s narrow F ring.
The discovery was announced after scientists examined Voyager 1 images obtained during the spacecraft’s Saturn encounter. Pandora’s orbit places it near the F ring, where its gravity helps influence the ring’s structure along with the nearby moon Prometheus.
Pandora is irregularly shaped and heavily cratered. It is much smaller than Saturn’s major moons, so it does not have the rounded appearance produced by stronger self-gravity in large planetary satellites.
The moon’s name comes from Pandora in Greek mythology. It is not the same object as the main-belt asteroid 55 Pandora, which is a separate body discovered in the nineteenth century.