Tag: Ariel

Ariel is the brightest and fourth-largest of the 27 known moons of Uranus. Discovered on 24 October 1851 by William Lassell, it is named for a sky spirit in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Ariel orbits and rotates in the equatorial plane of Uranus, which is almost perpendicular to the orbit of Uranus, and so has an extreme seasonal cycle. As of 2011, almost all knowledge of Ariel derives from a single flyby of Uranus performed by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986, which managed to image only 35% of the moon’s surface. There are no plans at present to return to study the moon in more detail.
After Miranda, Ariel is the second-smallest of Uranus’ five major rounded satellites, and the second-closest to its planet. Among the smallest of the Solar System’s 19 known spherical moons (it ranks 14th among them in diameter), it is believed to be composed of roughly equal parts ice and rocky material. Like all of Uranus’ moons, Ariel probably formed from an…