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It's a nice round number, but the greatest significance of the recently discovered 60th moon of Saturn may be as a sign there are even more rocky satellites yet to be found.

Saturn's newest moon — at least the latest to come to the attention of Earthlings — is a roughly 2 kilometer-diameter rock (1 1/4-mile diameter) detected by a camera on the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini-Huygens is a joint mission of NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.

"I wouldn't say it's the most mind-blowing discovery we've ever made," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team leader and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations in Boulder, Colo. Porco is a former University of Arizona Lunar & Planetary Laboratory professor. She left in 2001 for the imaging-team job.

"It's nice to know we're finding new real estate around Saturn," said Porco. "It's telling us there may be more bodies like it in the same vicinity."

Indeed, the response was also underwhelming from a Cassini scientist at the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

"Maybe there are more of them. If it turns out that there might be a bunch more of them, that could be interesting," said planetary sciences professor Robert H. Brown.

The primary targets for Cassini-Huygens were Saturn and Titan, its huge moon — larger than the planet Mercury and with a thick atmosphere.

Brown is the team leader on Cassini's Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, known as VIMS, which he says operates in 352 wavelengths simultaneously and can tell more about the composition and distribution of materials in an object than a camera working in just the visible part of the spectrum. Brown said VIMS has been concentrating on Saturn and Titan, where it is able to penetrate the huge moon's thick atmosphere.

Two other small (3- to 4-kilometer diameter — about 2- and 2 1/2-mile diameter ) moons had already been found in the same general area as No. 60.

"It's in the same plane as all the other bodies in the inner Saturnian system," said Porco. "These are between the orbits of the moons Mimas and Enceladus. It's the smallest of the small bodies we've found so far."

Cassini isn't in a regular orbit around Saturn, Porco said, but is being maneuvered on a complicated route to provide targets for its imagers and instruments.

Porco's not talking about the moon's proposed name. She can't reveal it before it is presented to the International Astronomical Union — the same outfit that busted Pluto down from planet status last year.

As for Brown: "I'm kind of speechless about this satellite, and not because I'm impressed with it.

"When it comes to something like this one of the questions one has to ask is, 'How small is a moon?' And 'When does it become a moon or a piece of rock?' "