Satellites & Moons

The planet Uranus (the bright blue object) is surrounded by its five largest satellites clockwise from top left, Ariel, Umbriel, Oberon, Titania, and Miranda, in this collage created from photographs taken by the United States Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986.

Ariel (on the right) is the fourth-largest of Uranus’s satellites, and is composed of about equal proportions of ice and rock. Its surface is scarred by many deep and ancient chasms where the crust has split and been filled with water welling up from the interior and freezing.

The United States spacecraft Voyager 2 passed closer to Miranda (lower) than to any of Uranus’s other moons, even though Miranda is not one of the planet’s largest satellites. The strangely grooved surface of the moon may have resulted from partially melted ice in the interior breaking through the frozen crust. Scientists coined colloquial names for Miranda’s regions: the large triangular feature at centre-left was named the Chevron, the rectangular region with rounded corners straddling the right limb of the moon was called the Racetrack, and the faint elongated oval shape on the left limb was dubbed the Circus Maximus. The sides of the notch visible above the point of the Chevron are formed by ice cliffs some 20 km (12 mi) high.

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