Links
- Wikipedia
- Miranda on Wikipedia
Miranda
Details
Miranda is the smallest and innermost of Uranus' major moons, but Voyager 2 revealed one of the strangest surfaces in the Solar System. Its patchwork coronae, ridges, valleys, and giant fault canyons make it geologically surprising for a moon only about 500 kilometers across.
Miranda matters because it looks too small to have such an unsettled face. At about 500 kilometers across, it should be easy to imagine as a simple icy satellite. Voyager 2 showed the opposite: a patchwork world where old cratered terrain sits beside sharp-edged regions of ridges, valleys, and complex deformation.
The features that define Miranda are its coronae. NASA describes these broad collections of ridges and valleys as unique among known Solar System objects, and they make the moon look as if different terrains were fitted together imperfectly. The giant fault canyons push that contrast even further, reaching depths far beyond familiar Earth-scale canyon intuition.
That is why Miranda matters on this scale. It shows that small icy moons can hold geological surprises out of proportion to their size. Miranda is not important because it is large; it is important because it makes a modest Uranian moon look like a broken map of internal and impact-driven history.
218km
Key facts
- Scale fact
- 500 kmdiameter
- Composition
- Water ice and silicate rock
Scale context
Where Miranda sits on the full axis
Together, these objects make the size change around Miranda easy to compare at a glance.
Sources
References for Miranda
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Miranda — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Kevin M. Gill, CC BY 2.0)
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.