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On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness. [76] Near the time of the equinoxes, the Sun faces the equator of Uranus, giving a period of day–night cycles similar to those seen on most of the other planets.
Uranus is the third-largest and fourth most massive planet in the Solar System. It orbits the Sun at a distance of about 2.8 billion kilometers (1.7 billion miles) and completes one orbit every 84 years. The length of a day on Uranus as measured by Voyager 2 is 17 hours and 14 minutes.
Of Uranus's five round satellites, Miranda orbits closest to it, at roughly 129 000 km from the surface; about a quarter again as far as its most distant ring. It is the rounded moon that has the smallest orbit around a major planet.
Its unusual tilt makes Uranus appear to orbit the sun like a rolling ball. Uranus, which orbits almost 20 times further from the sun than Earth does, has 28 known moons and two sets of rings.
The orbits of the regular moons are nearly coplanar with Uranus's equator, which is tilted 97.77° to its orbit. Uranus's irregular moons have elliptical and strongly inclined (mostly retrograde) orbits at large distances from the planet. [3] William Herschel discovered the first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.
Repeat orbit: An orbit where the ground track of the satellite repeats after a period of time. Gangale orbit: a solar orbit near Mars whose period is one Martian year, but whose eccentricity and inclination both differ from that of Mars such that a relay satellite in a Gangale orbit is visible from Earth even during solar conjunction. [28]
Orbit insertion. v. t. e. The orbital period (also revolution period) is the amount of time a given astronomical object takes to complete one orbit around another object. In astronomy, it usually applies to planets or asteroids orbiting the Sun, moons orbiting planets, exoplanets orbiting other stars, or binary stars.
Oberon / ˈoʊbərɒn /, also designated Uranus IV, is the outermost and second-largest major moon of the planet Uranus. It is the second-most massive of the Uranian moons, and the tenth-largest moon in the Solar System. Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, Oberon is named after the mythical king of the fairies who appears as a character in ...