The Orbits of Prometheus, Pandora and Atlas in 1980 and 1981.

Details The Orbits of Prometheus, Pandora and Atlas in 1980 and 1981. The Orbits of Prometheus, Pandora and Atlas in 1980 and 1981.

Oct 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000dps....32.4911m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #32, #49.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1090

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

HST and ground-based observations of the F ring region of Saturn have shown that the satellite Prometheus lags ~19o behind its predicted longitude based on the published orbit derived from Voyager images by Synnott et al. ([1983] Icarus 53, 156--158). Observations of Pandora appeared to show it at its predicted location; there have been no confirmed detections of Atlas since 1981. The anomalous position of Prometheus and the suggestion that its orbit can change have led us to carry out a re-examination of the original Voyager data for all three satellites. We have identified 57 Voyager 1 and 66 Voyager 2 images of Prometheus suitable for orbit determination and calculated the orbital elements. We obtain mean motions of 587.3010 +/- 0.0028od-1 and 587.2927 +/- 0.0011od-1 at the Voyager 1 and 2 epochs respectively. This strongly suggests that Prometheus' orbit changed in the nine months between the two encounters. Combining the data we obtain a mean motion of 587.28933 +/- 0.00008od-1. This compares favourably with the value of 587.2890+/-0.0005od-1 quoted by Synnott et al. (1983) but differs significantly from the HST value of 587.287751+/-0.000045od-1 obtained by French et al. ([1998] B.A.A.S. 30, 1141). We also find evidence for (i) an eccentricity lower than the published value of 0.0024 and (ii) an inclination of 0.027+/-0.006o. Using 87 images of Pandora and 23 images of Atlas our preliminary results are consistent with previously published orbits provided the effect of the 3:2 near-resonance between Pandora and Mimas (Dones et al. [1999] B.A.A.S. 31, 1228) is not included. In neither case did we find a significant difference in the orbits between the Voyager encounters.

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