Wednesday, March 1, 2017

What planet does Miranda belong to?

I believe that this question is asking about the moon that is named Miranda. Miranda is one of the moons of Uranus, and it was discovered in 1948 from the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Many of Uranus's moons are named after Shakespeare characters, and Miranda is named for a character in The Tempest. Miranda is about 500 kilometers in diameter, so it isn't exactly a huge moon. By comparison, Earth's moon is 3,474 kilometers in diameter. NASA's website isn't exactly complimentary to Miranda either.

Like Frankenstein's monster, Miranda looks like it was pieced together from parts that didn't quite merge properly.

Miranda's unique, pieced together structure does give the moon some very interesting features. Miranda contains some incredibly deep fault canyons. These canyons are 12 times deeper than Earth's Grand Canyon. Because Miranda isn't very massive, it has low gravity. The low gravity, combined with the depth of those canyons means that a dropped rock from the canyon edge would take 10 minutes to hit the bottom.

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