Miranda

Home of the tallest cliff in the Solar System

Miranda is Uranus's strange little moon. It looks as if it was put together from different pieces: flat here, grooved there, a cliff over there. Its cliff Verona Rupes is 20 km high — twice the height of Everest! If you jumped off, you'd fall for 12 minutes.

Miranda (radius 236 km) is the smallest and innermost of Uranus's five major moons, orbiting every 1.41 days. In 1986 Voyager 2 revealed one of the strangest surfaces in the Solar System: ancient cratered plains next to 'coronae' — huge oval grooved regions (Inverness, Arden, Elsinore). The cliff Verona Rupes is 20 km high — the tallest in the Solar System. One hypothesis: Miranda partly melted from tidal heating in the past, and ice 'floated' upward. The name comes from Shakespeare's The Tempest — all of Uranus's moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Pope.

Fun facts

• Jump off Verona Rupes and you'd 'fly' for 12 minutes — gravity is that weak.
• Uranus's moons are named after Shakespeare's characters, not gods — Miranda, Titania, Oberon...
• Only one spacecraft has ever seen Miranda — Voyager 2 in 1986.