Physical Properties
Orbit
Sources & Further Reading
- NASA — official mission / factsheet page
- Wikipedia — extensive cross-referenced article
- NASA u2014 Miranda
Numerical values (radius, mass, orbital elements, temperatures) are drawn from NASA NSSDC Planetary Fact Sheets, JPL Horizons, and the JPL Small-Body Database. Last refreshed: 2026-04-18 18:19:24.
Miranda is the innermost of Uranus’s five major moons and the smallest. Despite its size — barely 472 km across — it has one of the most bizarre surfaces in the Solar System. Three large oval “coronae” (Arden, Elsinore, Inverness), each ~200-300 km across, disrupt a heavily cratered terrain. Verona Rupes, a cliff with a ~20 km vertical drop, may be the tallest cliff anywhere known. Miranda’s appearance led to speculation that it had been shattered by an impact and then re-accreted; more recent modeling favors partial differentiation driven by ancient tidal heating.