Phoebe (moon) - Physical Characteristics

Physical Characteristics

Phoebe is roughly spherical and has a diameter of 213 kilometres (132 mi), which is equal to about one-sixteenth of the diameter of Earth's Moon. Phoebe rotates on its axis every nine hours and it completes a full orbit around Saturn in about 18 months. Its surface temperature is 75 K (−198.2 °C).

Most of Saturn's inner moons have very bright surfaces, but Phoebe's albedo is very low (0.06), as dark as lampblack. The Phoebean surface is extremely heavily scarred, with craters up to 80 kilometres across, one of which has walls 16 kilometres high.

Phoebe's dark coloring initially led to scientists surmising that it was a captured asteroid, as it resembled the common class of dark carbonaceous asteroids. These are chemically very primitive and are thought to be composed of original solids that condensed out of the solar nebula with little modification since then.

However, images from Cassini indicate that Phoebe's craters show a considerable variation in brightness, which indicate the presence of large quantities of ice below a relatively thin blanket of dark surface deposits some 300 to 500 metres (980 to 1,600 ft) thick. In addition, quantities of carbon dioxide have been detected on the surface, a finding which has never been replicated on an asteroid. It is estimated that Phoebe is about 50% rock, as opposed to the 35% or so that typifies Saturn's inner moons. For these reasons, scientists are coming to believe that Phoebe is in fact a captured centaur, one of a number of icy planetoids from the Kuiper belt that orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune. Phoebe is the first such object to be imaged as anything other than a dot.

Despite its small size, Phoebe is thought to have been a hot, spherical body early in its history, with a differentiated interior, before solidifying and being battered into its current, slightly non-equilibrium shape.

Material displaced from Phoebe's surface by microscopic meteor impacts may be responsible for the dark surfaces of Hyperion. Debris from the biggest impacts may have been the building blocks of the other moons of Phoebe's group—all of which are less than 10 km in diameter.