major moon · moon of Uranus
Miranda
The smallest of Uranus's major moons, a patchwork world of grooved terrain and some of the tallest cliffs in the Solar System.
- Distance from Earth today
- 2.77 billion km18.52 AU · light: 2 h 34 min
- Distance from the Sun today
- 2.91 billion km19.43 AU
- As of
- 3 November 2026position from NASA/JPL orbital elements
Where it is today
Top view of the plane of Earth’s orbit, compressed distance scale. Open on the big map with the time slider →
Facts
- Diameter
- 472 km
- Mass
- 64.4 × 10¹⁸ kg
- Density
- 1,178 kg/m³
- Mean distance from the planet
- 129,846 km
- Orbital period
- 33.9 h
- Orbital eccentricity
- 0.0010
- Orbital inclination
- 4.4°
Source of the figures: JPL SSD – Planetary Satellites (public domain).
Discovery: 1948 – Gerard Kuiper
Description
Miranda is the innermost and smallest of the five major moons of Uranus, discovered by Gerard Kuiper in 1948. When Voyager 2 photographed it in 1986, scientists were astonished by its patchwork surface: old cratered plains broken by huge, oval regions of parallel grooves and ridges called coronae. It also hosts Verona Rupes, a fault scarp thought to be among the tallest cliffs in the Solar System. Miranda's chaotic geology is probably the result of tidal heating and internal upwelling in the past, and some models suggest it may once have had a subsurface ocean.