Discovery of Ariel

Ariel is one of the five large moons of Uranus and was discovered by the English amateur astronomer William Lassell, working with a large telescope of his own making. John Herschel later named it, along with the other moons of Uranus, for characters in literature; Ariel appears both in Shakespeare's The Tempest and in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. It is the brightest of Uranus's large moons and shows the youngest surface among them, with deep canyons and smooth plains suggesting past geological activity. Voyager 2 flew past in 1986 and remains the only spacecraft to have photographed it close up.

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