Miranda, the smallest and innermost of the five large moons of Uranus, was discovered by the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper using the telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. Kuiper named it after a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest, continuing the tradition of naming the Uranian moons after literary figures. Voyager 2's flyby in 1986 revealed a surprisingly varied surface, with patchwork regions of ridges and grooves, enormous fault canyons and one of the tallest known cliffs in the Solar System, Verona Rupes. Scientists suspect that Miranda was disrupted and re-formed in the past or has been reshaped by tidal heating.
Before and after
- 1948Claude Shannon founds information theory
- 7 January 1948Birth of Ichirō Mizuki
- 30 January 1948Death of Mahatma Gandhi
- 11 February 1948Death of Sergei Eisenstein
- 16 February 1948Discovery of Miranda
- from 17 February 1948 to 1 March 1948Alwaziri coup
- 25 February 19481948 Czechoslovak coup d'état
- 28 February 1948Birth of Steven Chu
- 7 March 1948Founding of Nea Salamis Famagusta FC
More in Universe & space
- 4 October 1957Launch of Sputnik 1
- 22 October 1969Discovery of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
- 14 September 1974Discovery of Leda
- 28 July 1989Discovery of Galatea
- 19 January 2006Launch of New Horizons
- 26 June 2012Discovery of Styx
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.