[X] My Assistant

[jasedm]

On September 9th 2004, Nasa announced the possible discovery of two new Saturnian moons, spotted by Carl Murray, from pictures taken just prior to Cassini orbit insertion. Both appear to orbit within 1000 kilometres of the F-ring. In the intervening two years, as far as I'm aware, there have been no follow-up press releases on these possible objects. Does anybody have any subsequent information on these? Possibly (as stated in the release) they were just short-lived agglomerations of ring material, although diameters were quoted as being in the region of 4-5 km

[jasedm]

Thanks admin for fixing the file extension - the cropped image shows this much more clearly.
It appears that the widest gap in the original image is the Huygens gap (with a small embedded ringlet), and the smaller gaps are exterior to this, at about 120,000km from Saturn's centre. This is obviously well inside the Roche limit - I wonder how far the tensile strength of ice would prevent tidal disruption?