Discovery of Cupid

Cupid is a tiny inner moon of Uranus, only a few tens of kilometres across, and was discovered by Mark Showalter and Jack Lissauer using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is too faint to have been seen by Voyager 2 and was found by searching for small bodies near the planet's ring system. It orbits close to Belinda in the group of inner moons, and calculations suggest that this crowded region is unstable over long periods. Following the convention for Uranus's moons, it is named after a character in Shakespeare, in this case the figure of Cupid in the play Timon of Athens.

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