Discovery of Cressida

Cressida is an inner moon of Uranus, about 80 kilometres across, discovered in January 1986 in images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft and credited to Stephen Synnott. It orbits near the planet's rings between Bianca and Desdemona. It is named after the heroine of Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida. Cressida belongs to a crowded group of small inner moons whose orbits interact and are unstable over long periods, so that collisions between neighbours such as Cressida and Desdemona may happen in the distant future. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus, so Cressida is known only from the photographs taken in 1986.

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