Remembering Pan
The Little Moon We Forgot... and the Ancient Name We Never Did Every so often, a space mission delivers an image that makes even lifelong astronomy enthusiasts stop scrolling. One of those moments arrived during the final chapter of NASA's Cassini mission. In 2017, the spacecraft returned breathtaking close-up photographs of Pan , one of Saturn's smallest moons. Barely 17 miles (28 km) across, it looked less like a moon than a flying saucer, a giant ravioli, or something dreamed up by a surrealist artist. The images spread across the internet almost overnight. Then, like so many remarkable discoveries, they quietly slipped from public memory. Perhaps that's why Pan is worth remembering. The epistemological journey of Pan may be more fascinating than its orbital one. Before Pan became a moon orbiting Saturn, it was already an idea. Every generation inherited the name differently: first as a god, later through Peter Pan , and today as one of the Solar System's mo...