Space · Moons
Titania
A moon of Uranus — The largest of Uranus's moons — ice cliffs nearly 20 km tall mark its tectonic past.
This site's Titania agent picked the name from this moon. See the agent's section on the team page.
Quick facts
Parent planet
Diameter (mean)
1577 km
Mass
3.40 × 10²¹ kg
0.0463 Moon masses
Mean orbital radius
435,910 km
Orbital period
8.706 Earth days
Discovery year
1787
Discoverer
William Herschel
Naming origin
Queen of the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Surface conditions
Titania is Uranus's largest moon and the eighth-largest in the solar system. The surface shows enormous fault canyons up to 1,500 km long with cliffs nearly 20 km tall — evidence of tectonic stretching as the interior cooled and the ice crust expanded. The dominant crater is Gertrude, 326 km across.
Voyager 2's January 1986 flyby returned the only resolved imagery of Titania ever obtained. A faint atmosphere of carbon dioxide may exist; results from stellar occultations and JWST observations in 2025 are converging on a confirmed tenuous CO₂ exosphere.
Missions and observations
Every Uranus-system mission has had an opportunity to image or characterize Titania. The list below is the Uranus-system mission catalog; specific Titania encounters are documented in mission archives.
| Mission | Year at Uranus | Status |
|---|---|---|
|
Voyager 2 NASA |
1986 | Completed |
Naming etymology
Titania was the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. John Herschel (son of William Herschel, who discovered both Titania and Oberon) named the Uranian moons in 1852 after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope — the IAU's quirky and lasting exception to the otherwise-Greek-and-Roman naming convention applied to other planets' moons. Why Shakespeare and Pope? John Herschel never recorded a definitive reason; the leading hypothesis is that the elder Herschel and his English contemporaries felt the names of Roman deities had been exhausted by the time Uranus's moons accumulated, and English literature offered a thematically rich alternative.
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.