Features on Saturn's Moon Phoebe Named

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=898

FEATURES ON SATURN'S MOON PHOEBE NAMED

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
CASSINI IMAGING CENTRAL LABORATORY FOR OPERATIONS (CICLOPS)
SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLORADO
http://ciclops.org


Preston Dyches (720) 974-5823
CICLOPS/Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For Immediate Release: February 24, 2005

FEATURES ON SATURN'S MOON PHOEBE NAMED

Twenty-four of the largest craters on Phoebe, the small, retrograde
outer moon of Saturn have been assigned names by the International
Astronomical Union.

Two image montages of Phoebe, the first stop in the Saturn tour by the
Cassini spacecraft taken in June 2004, are being released today and
show
the names and locations of the 24 craters identified by the Cassini
imaging team as prominent enough to receive names.

The new Phoebe images are available at
http://ciclops.org, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

"We picked the legend of the Argonauts for Phoebe as it has some
resonance with the exploration of the Saturn system by
Cassini-Huygens,"
said Dr. Toby Owen, of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the
chairman of the International Astronomical Union Outer Solar System
Task
Group and an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini-Huygens
mission.
"We can't say that our participating scientists include heroes like
Hercules and Atalanta, but they do represent a wide, international
spectrum of outstanding people who were willing to take the risk of
joining this voyage to a distant realm in hopes of bringing back a
grand
prize?.

Phoebe is an icy, ancient remnant of the small bodies that formed over
four billion years ago in the outer reaches of the solar system. It
must
have been captured by giant Saturn in the planet's earliest, formative
years.

"Considering the length and complexity of the Cassini mission, it is
appropriate that the names of these courageous voyagers from one of our
favorite myths have been used for the first Cassini maps of the Saturn
system," said Dr. Peter Thomas, Cassini imaging team member, Cornell
University, Ithaca, N.Y. and one of the imaging scientists who
identified the craters requiring names and created the composites being
released today.

The practice for the International Astronomical Union is to use a
different category for surface features on each object. That way, when
people hear or see a name, they can associate it with the object on
which the feature is found. They often start with names associated with
the legends involving the being whose name is given to the object
itself, then choose an additional category if more names are needed.
This is what happened with Phoebe, since her legend is rather short and
there were not enough names for all the features that required them.
Phoebe is named after a Titan goddess, grandmother of Apollo in Greek
mythology.

"Since the dawn of exploration, humans have made maps to document where
they have been and how to get there. Having names for the places on the
map is an essential part of this process. With the assignment of names
to craters on its surface, Phoebe now joins the ranks of charted
worlds"
said Dr. Torrence Johnson, Cassini imaging team member at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who coordinated the naming of
the Phoebe craters with the IAU.

Images collected during Cassini's close flyby of Phoebe have yielded
strong evidence that the tiny object may contain ice-rich material
overlain with a thin layer of darker material perhaps 300 to 500 meters
(980 to 1,600 feet) thick. The surface of Phoebe is also heavily
potholed with large and small craters. Images reveal bright streaks in
the ramparts of the largest craters, bright rays which emanate from
smaller craters and uninterrupted grooves across the face of the body.
Phoebe's craters are thought to be the result of collisions with
smaller
objects.

Naming features on planetary bodies is the result of cooperation
between
the International Astronomical Union, the U.S. Geological Survey, and
NASA. The International Astronomical Union is the internationally
recognized authority for assigning names to planetary surface features,
and the Astrogeology Team of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff,
Ariz., maintains the database containing all planetary feature names
(see the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature at
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/).
The work performed by the Astrogeology Team is supported by NASA.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science
Mission
Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard
cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team
is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.