World

Miranda

Miranda is the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, with canyons up to 12 times the Grand Canyon’s depth, about 472 km across.

Key facts

Diameter

472 km

Goes round

Uranus

See it from here

Barely: Miranda is magnitude 16.6, lost in Uranus’s glare, and invisible to many amateur telescopes.

How the map draws it

Its surface is a black-and-white mosaic, tinted in a colour chosen from published descriptions · only the southern half was photographed, by Voyager 2 in 1986; the rest is left plain, not guessed · lit as a camera exposed for its own sunlight would show it · seen from far off it is a light at its computed brightness: the glow is how a camera records a point too bright to resolve.