The external gravitational field produced by a rigid body of uniform density but irregular shape is formulated in terms of spherical harmonics. The formalism is applied to the Martian satellite Phobos. Based on a 3‐dimensional shape model of Phobos by Duxbury, the gravitational coefficients up to degree and order 4 for a homogeneous Phobos are computed. In particular, we find J 2 = 0.105. The in‐plane libration amplitude of a homogeneous Phobos is predicted to be 0.97°, within the rather large uncertainty of the observed value of 0.78 ± 0.4°.
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Chao et al. (1989) studied this question.
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