Miranda (moon)

A Special Moon Named Miranda

Miranda is a tiny moon that orbits the planet Uranus. It is the smallest and closest of Uranus’s five round moons. Miranda is named after a character from a play called The Tempest written by William Shakespeare.

Miranda is very small — about the size of the U.S. state of Texas! Its surface has some of the most interesting shapes and features of any object in our Solar System. One of the most amazing things about Miranda are its steep cliffs. One cliff, called Verona Rupes, might be one of the tallest known in space!

Most of what we know about Miranda comes from a spacecraft called Voyager 2. It flew by Uranus in 1986 and sent back the first close-up pictures of this fascinating moon. Scientists were very surprised by what they saw! Miranda has unusual round areas called coronae and many cracks and patterns that tell a story of its past.

Miranda was discovered in 1948 by an astronomer named Gerard Kuiper using a telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. It was the first new moon of Uranus found in almost 100 years! Like the other moons of Uranus, Miranda spins on its side because Uranus itself spins sideways. This makes Miranda’s path look very tilted compared to Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

Even though Miranda is small, it has big secrets waiting for scientists to uncover!