Thebe, also known as Jupiter XIV, is a moon of Jupiter. It was discovered by Stephen P. Synnott in images from the Voyager 1 space probe, taken on March 5, 1979, while making a flyby of Jupiter. The planet was named in 1983 after the mythological nymph Thebe.
It is the planet's seventh largest moon. It is the second largest of the inner satellites of Jupiter, and orbits within the outer edge of the "Thebe gossamer ring". It is irregularly shaped and reddish in color. It contains large craters and very tall mountains, some of them being comparable to the size of the Moon itself.
It was photographed by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, and later, in more detial, by the Galileo orbiter in the 1990s.
Orbit[]
Thebe is the outermost of the inner Jupiter satellites, and it orbits Jupiter at a distance of around 222,000 km, or 3.11 Jupiter radii. It has an eccentricity of 0.018, and an inclination of 1.08° relative to the equator of Jupiter.
These properties are unusually high for an inner satellite and can be explained by past influence of the innermost Galilean satellite, Io.
It takes approximately 16 hours and 11 minutes for Thebe to orbit around Jupiter.