Saturn's Moon Epimetheus from the Cassini Spacecraft
How did Epimetheus form?
No one is yet sure.
To help answer that question,
this small moon has recently been imaged again in great detail by the
robot spacecraft Cassini now orbiting
Saturn.
Epimetheus
sometimes
orbits Saturn in front of
Janus,
another small satellite, but sometimes behind.
The above image,
taken last December,
shows a surface covered with craters
indicating great age.
Epimetheus spans about 115 kilometers across.
Epimetheus
does not have enough
surface gravity to restructure itself into a
sphere.
The flattened face of
Epimetheus shown
above
might have been created by a
single large impact.