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Uranus at European Space Agency; NASA's Uranus fact sheet; Uranus Profile at NASA's Solar System Exploration site; Planets – Uranus A kid's guide to Uranus. Uranus at Jet Propulsion Laboratory's planetary photojournal. (photos) Voyager at Uranus (photos) Uranus (Astronomy Cast homepage) (blog) Uranian system montage (photo) Gray, Meghan ...
Uranus has at least one horseshoe orbiter occupying the Sun–Uranus L 3 Lagrangian point—a gravitationally unstable region at 180° in its orbit, 83982 Crantor. [154] [155] Crantor moves inside Uranus's co-orbital region on a complex, temporary horseshoe orbit. 2010 EU 65 is also a promising Uranus horseshoe librator candidate. [155]
Semi-synchronous orbit: An orbit with an orbital period equal to half of the average rotational period of the body being orbited and in the same direction of rotation as that body. For Earth this means a period of just under 12 hours at an altitude of approximately 20,200 km (12,544.2 miles) if the orbit is circular. [16]
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.
Margaret stands out as the only prograde irregular satellite of Uranus. The diagram illustrates the orbital parameters of Margaret, unique among the irregular satellites of Uranus, with inclination on the vertical axis and the eccentricity of the orbits represented by the segments extending from the pericentre to the apocentre.
Its orbital period is 34 hours and, like that of the Moon, is synchronous with its rotation period, which means it always shows the same face to Uranus, a condition known as tidal locking. Miranda's orbital inclination (4.34°) is unusually high for a body so close to its planet – roughly ten times that of the other major Uranian satellites ...
Cordelia acts as the inner shepherd satellite for Uranus's ε ring. [11] Cordelia's orbit is within Uranus's synchronous orbit radius, and is therefore slowly decaying due to tidal deceleration. [5] Cordelia is very close to a 5:3 orbital resonance with Rosalind. [12]
Among Uranus's five major moons, Ariel is the second closest to the planet, orbiting at the distance of about 190,000 km. [f] Its orbit has a small eccentricity and is inclined very little relative to the equator of Uranus. [3] Its orbital period is around 2.5 Earth days, coincident with its rotational period.