Discovery of Thebe

Thebe is the largest of the four inner moons of Jupiter, though it is still only about a hundred kilometres across. It was found by Stephen Synnott in images taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft and is named after a nymph of Greek mythology. Thebe is irregular in shape, dark and heavily cratered, and it orbits outside the main ring, at the edge of a very faint ring called the Thebe Gossamer Ring, which is made of dust knocked off its surface by micrometeorite impacts. The Galileo spacecraft later observed the moon and measured its size and shape more accurately.

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