The Hindu : International : Cassini lifts veil on Phoebe

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Friday, Jun 25, 2004

International

International

Cassini lifts veil on Phoebe

Pasadena (California): The Cassini spacecraft's flyby of Saturn's strange moon Phoebe this month revealed in sharp detail a frozen, battered orb that scientific findings suggest is a 4-billion-year-old relic of the early solar system. Images released on Wednesday by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory show Phoebe's heavily cratered surface, cliffs miles high, boulders and elongated grooves. Instruments on the Saturn-bound Cassini sent data indicating the moon is a mix of ice, rock and carbon-containing compounds, scientists said. Similar material has been seen in Pluto and Neptune's moon Triton. Imaging team member Torrence Johnson said that until the June 11 flyby little was known about Phoebe, except that it orbited in the opposite direction as Saturn's other moons and that small amounts of ice had been detected by astronomers on Earth. ``We believe ... we can say fairly firmly now that this object is something that was formed in the outer solar system, not in the asteroid belt or in closer to the sun, and was captured by (Saturn) very early in the history of the solar system,'' he said. That would mean Phoebe was one of the small bodies that scientists believe were building blocks of the outer solar system, swept toward Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. While gravitational interactions hurled many of these small bodies far away into what is known as the Kuiper Belt, Phoebe was apparently trapped in Saturn's clutches.

— AP

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