The Cassini spacecraft, which should soon reach the planet Saturn, passed at the end of last week at a distance of only about 2,000 kilometers from Phoebe, one of Saturn's moons, and sent photographs of it.
Phoebe is a relatively small object (about 200 kilometers in diameter) and dark (it reflects only 6% of the light that reaches it from the sun). "On the surface of this strange moon there is little ice and a lot of black matter. Other than that, we know very little," said Dale Cruickshank, a NASA scientist who will analyze the information sent by "Cassini" to try to determine the chemical composition of the moon. The many craters on Phoebe apparently indicate that the moon was hit by large chunks of ice and rock. One of the strangest features of Phoebe is that the moon orbits Saturn in the opposite direction than the other 30 moons that orbit the planet.
