The Cassini-Huygens space probe discovered two new moons around Saturn, which could be the smallest ever spotted around the ringed planet, NASA officials said Tuesday.
The moons - measuring three and four kilometres (about two miles) in diameter - are located 194,000 and 211,000 kilometres (120,500 and 131,000 miles), respectively, from Saturn. They have been temporarily named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2.
"One of our major objectives in returning to Saturn was to survey the entire system for new bodies," said Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader at the Boulder, Colorado-based Space Science Institute.
"We can now add the confirmation of two new moons, unnoticed around Saturn for billions of years, until now," she said.
The moons were identified by Sebastien Charnoz of France, a planetary dynamics specialist, along with Andre Brahic of the University of Paris, who was part of the imaging team, NASA said.
The craft, made up of a US-built orbiter (Cassini) and a European-built probe (Huygens), embarked on a seven-year, 3.5-billion-kilometer (2.2-billion-mile) voyage to explore Saturn.
The US contribution was 2.6 billion dollars and the EU's, 660 million. The Italian Space Agency supplied the probe's high-gain antenna, which channels all communications with Earth.
Cassini-Huygens is the first man-made object to orbit the ringed planet, the sixth planet from the Sun and second in size after Jupiter.
The probe is named after Jean-Dominique Cassini, a 17th century Paris Observatory director who discovered several of Saturn's moons and detected space between its rings, and 17th-century Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens, who first observed Saturn's rings.
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