Saturn has more than 60 moons, but a handful of them do more than spangle the planet’s skies.

Snuggled close to Saturn, these innermost moons are small — Epimetheus, one of the largest, stretches just 72 miles across. But they are hefty enough to help sculpt Saturn’s rings. Orbiting at the edges of some of the planet’s main rings, or within gaps between them, these shepherd moons wield enough gravity to herd icy ring particles into place. Some like Atlas tend the bangles by pruning and neatening their edges. Others, like Pan and Daphnis, mow lanes between the rings.

“These moons kind of sweep out cavities within the rings,” said Bonnie Buratti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who described the mini-moons in a study published Thursday in Science.

But the rings sculpt the moons, too, coating them with colorful mounds of ice and crafting some unusual shapes.

“They’re quite different than the rest of the moons,” said Carly Howett of the Southwest Research Institute, a co-author. “Some of them look absolutely crazy.”