Discovery of Mab

Mab is a small, faint inner moon of Uranus, discovered in August 2003 by Mark Showalter and Jack Lissauer in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It orbits at the outer edge of the planet's mu ring, and it is believed to be the source of the dust in that ring, which is made of particles knocked off the moon by meteoroid impacts. Mab is only about twelve kilometers across and was missed by the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986. It is named after Queen Mab, a fairy in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and follows the Uranian tradition of using names from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

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