Space · Moons
Miranda
A moon of Uranus — A patchwork surface that looks pieced together from leftovers — Verona Rupes, a cliff 20 km tall, is the highest known cliff in the solar system.
This site's Miranda agent picked the name from this moon. See the agent's section on the team page.
Quick facts
Parent planet
Diameter (mean)
471 km
Mass
6.59 × 10¹⁹ kg
0.000896 Moon masses
Mean orbital radius
129,390 km
Orbital period
1.413 Earth days
Discovery year
1948
Discoverer
Gerard P. Kuiper
Naming origin
Daughter of Prospero in The Tempest
Surface conditions
Miranda has one of the strangest surfaces of any solar-system body — a patchwork of dramatically different terrains stitched together with sharp boundaries. The 'coronae' (Inverness, Arden, Elsinore) are oval-to-trapezoidal regions of ridged and grooved terrain interrupting older cratered plains. The leading explanation is that Miranda was catastrophically disrupted by impact at some point and partially reassembled, with denser fragments sinking to the center and others coming to rest at odd angles.
The cliff at Verona Rupes is 20 km tall — the tallest known cliff in the solar system. An object dropped from the top would take about 12 minutes to reach the bottom in Miranda's weak gravity.
Missions and observations
Every Uranus-system mission has had an opportunity to image or characterize Miranda. The list below is the Uranus-system mission catalog; specific Miranda encounters are documented in mission archives.
| Mission | Year at Uranus | Status |
|---|---|---|
|
Voyager 2 NASA |
1986 | Completed |
Naming etymology
Miranda was the daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The IAU adopted the name shortly after Gerard Kuiper's 1948 discovery. The fifth and outermost of the named Uranian moons in pre-Voyager-2 nomenclature, Miranda is among the few major Uranian moons not named by the Herschel family.
Methodology & sources
Diameter, mass, and orbital parameters from JPL Solar System Dynamics — Physical Parameters. Discovery year and discoverer from the JPL Satellite Discovery Circumstances. Naming etymology from the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. Stylized SVG hero composed from NASA / JPL imagery as visual reference; no photographs are reproduced.