S/2004 S 3

provisional 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

Wikidata facts

Image

~3 min read

Article

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.