Location from The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
Saturn's captured moon where the protomolecule was first discovered by Protogen researchers. A billion-year-old delivery system — an alien weapon aimed at Earth's solar system before complex life existed. Destroyed by the MCRN to prevent recovery.
Phoebe was never a natural part of Saturn's system. It was a delivery vehicle — fired at Earth's solar system approximately 2.3 billion years ago by the Ring Builders, aimed to crash into Earth and seed the planet with protomolecule. It missed, captured by Saturn's gravity instead, and waited in the cold for eons until humans found it. Protogen's researchers discovered the protomolecule in Phoebe's ice cores and recognized it as alien technology of staggering complexity. Rather than report the discovery, Mao and the Protogen leadership decided to weaponize it, beginning the chain of events that led to Eros, the hybrid soldiers, and eventually the Ring Gates. Mars destroyed Phoebe with nuclear weapons after the protomolecule's existence became known, sterilizing the moon to prevent anyone from recovering additional samples. But the damage was already done — samples had been removed, and the protomolecule was loose in the system. Destroying Phoebe was like locking a door after the fire had already spread.
A dark, irregularly shaped moon in a retrograde orbit around Saturn — its trajectory marking it as a captured object rather than a natural satellite. The surface is cratered ice and rock, unremarkable from the outside. The Protogen research station was a small facility built into the moon's surface, where teams drilled into ice cores and found something that didn't belong — crystalline structures containing the protomolecule, preserved for over two billion years in Phoebe's frozen interior.
Also known as: Phoebe, Phoebe Station, Phoebe Research Station