I put Middle Earth Journal in hiatus in May of 2008 and moved to Newshoggers.
I temporarily reopened Middle Earth Journal when Newshoggers shut it's doors but I was invited to Participate at The Moderate Voice so Middle Earth Journal is once again in hiatus.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Far Out

Phoebe's Surface Reveals Clues to its Origin
, from JPL.

The picture below was taken by the Cassani-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan.

Phoebe
Also known as: SXIX
Size: 220 km (though analysis of Cassini images is likely to change this number)
Orbital radius: 12 952 000 km
215 Saturn radii
An outer satellite, possibly captured
Discovery: 1898 by William Henry Pickering

Phoebe is one of Saturn's outermost satellites, the largest in a family of small, irregular, dark objects whose orbits tend not to lie in the plane of Saturn's rings. That makes it quite likely that these objects did not form in the Saturn system but instead were captured by Saturn's gravity. They could be asteroids, Centaurs, or even Kuiper Belt Objects.

The Voyager spacecraft captured hundreds of images of Phoebe in order to determine its spin axis and rotation rate. The pictures reveal that Phoebe is very dark but that there are lighter and darker areas within it.

Above courtesy of The Planetary Society

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