Many of the images downloaded from Cassini are not processed right away. While the spacecraft was heading to and from Titan it snapped pictures of some of the objects in the Saturnian system. This image of the F-ring includes what appears to be a tiny moon floating serenely nearby. Since the image has not been processed and remains in its raw format, there is no NASA-prepared caption to accompany the image. Is the object a moon or is it just an artifact from the camera?
The sheer volume of images returned from space missions is rapidly increasing. Even though processing such images has also sped up, for any given mission there remains much work to be done long after the primary mission has concluded. The treasure trove of data since the dawn of human spaceflight remains largely unexplored. With the advent of the Internet, many amateur scientists have taken it upon themselves to start examining this data, with new discoveries yet to be uncovered.