tacitus
06-15-2004, 07:27 PM
An 'oddball' moon of Saturn captivates astronomers (http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0616/p01s02-usgn.html)
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Phoebe is an ugly duckling among Saturn's natural satellites. Its dark surface is heavily cratered. It orbits the planet backward. And it refuses to swing around the planet in the same orbital plane as other moons do.
But the international Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has quickly turned the 140-mile-wide chunk of rock and ice into the darling of planetary scientists.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0616/csmimg/p1a.jpg
COSMIC SURGERY: Etched for eons by interplanetary debris.
NASA/JPL/REUTERS
Images and data taken at the weekend from 11 of the spacecraft's instruments could open an unprecedented window on the conditions that existed in the early solar system generally and on a young Saturn's environment in particular as it formed some 4.6 billion years ago.
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Phoebe is an ugly duckling among Saturn's natural satellites. Its dark surface is heavily cratered. It orbits the planet backward. And it refuses to swing around the planet in the same orbital plane as other moons do.
But the international Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has quickly turned the 140-mile-wide chunk of rock and ice into the darling of planetary scientists.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0616/csmimg/p1a.jpg
COSMIC SURGERY: Etched for eons by interplanetary debris.
NASA/JPL/REUTERS
Images and data taken at the weekend from 11 of the spacecraft's instruments could open an unprecedented window on the conditions that existed in the early solar system generally and on a young Saturn's environment in particular as it formed some 4.6 billion years ago.