S/2004 S 3
Sign in to saveprovisional designation of an unconfirmed object seen orbiting Saturn
Key facts
- Discovered by
- CICLOPS Team
- Discovery date
- June 21, 2004
- Semi major axis
- 140,100–140,600 km
- Eccentricity
- < 0.002
- Orbital period sidereal
- 0.62 d
- Inclination
- close to zero
- Satellite of
- Saturn
- Mean radius
- ~2 km
- Synodic rotation period
- probably synchronous
- Axial tilt
- unknown
- Albedo
- unknown
via Wikipedia infobox
~3 min read
Encyclopedic overview
S/2004 S 3 is an unconfirmed moon of Saturn, seen orbiting just beyond the outer strand of the F ring on June 21, 2004. It was discovered by the Cassini Imaging Science Team Archived 2011-05-20 at the Wayback Machine in images taken by the Cassini–Huygens probe on June 21, 2004 and announced on September 9, 2004.
Animated sequence of S/2004 S 3 discovery images by Cassini on June 21, 2004 Despite later attempts to recover it, it has not been reliably sighted since. Notably, an imaging sequence covering an entire orbital period at 4 km resolution taken on November 15, 2004 failed to recover the object. The sequence should have been easily capable of detecting a moon of similar size, suggesting it to simply be a transient clump. An approximate linkage could be made of S/2004 S 3 to S/2004 S 4, and matched to two other detected clumps on other dates, but considering its non-detection in November, their relation is probably coincidental.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “S/2004 S 3” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.