Discovery of Perdita

Perdita is a small inner moon of Uranus, which was only identified some years after the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, when Erich Karkoschka found it in the archived images. It orbits close to the planet, in a region near the larger moon Belinda. It is a dark, small body, with a size of only a few tens of kilometres. Like the other moons of Uranus, it is named after a character in the works of Shakespeare, in this case the lost daughter of Leontes and Hermione in The Winter's Tale.

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