This could break the hearts of its parents. Peggy, what could be the 63rd moon of Saturn, could disintegrate if it continues to orbit within the rings because it may eventually collide with smaller lumps of ice, scientists revealed.
At the same time, there's the chance that it may escape beyond Saturn's rings, where it runs the danger of wandering into the track of much bigger moons.
"Babies are safer in the womb, but they have to leave sometime -- and the paradox is that to get to safety, Peggy has to pass between other much larger objects," said professor Carl Murray from the Queen Mary University of London.
If it travels beyond those rings, scientists would have little chance of tracking Peggy because of its tiny size, which makes it even harder for the spacecraft to take a decent photo of it. Peggy is only a half-mile wide, a speck compared with the much bigger moons of Saturn such as Titan and Enceladus that dwarf their latest sibling.
Scientists have a theory why Saturn conceived such big moons before. "The theory holds that Saturn long ago had a much more massive ring system capable of giving birth to larger moons. As the moons formed near the edge, they depleted the rings and evolved, so the ones that formed earliest are the largest and the farthest out," Murray said.
There's hope while there's life, and the scientists continue to hope that the narrow angle camera of Cassini, in its final orbits two years from now, could go in a position that offers a better and more-detailed view of the outer edge of the ring, thus giving an opportunity to look at Peggy's fate. Until then, the scientists can only wait for further developments.
Planet Saturn has been dubbed the most-fertile planet, after having conceived more than 60 moons, of which 53 have been confirmed and nine more are suspected. This one named Peggy could be the planet's last baby since the rings containing debris are mostly depleted.
The newest moon-child Peggy was named by Murray to honor his mother-in-law, who turned 80 on the first day he started to study the images captured by Cassini.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) designed and assembled the Cassini spacecraft and its two onboard cameras. JPL also manages the mission for Science Mission Directorate of NASA in Washington. It is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. JPL's imaging operations center can be found at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
