Moons of Uranus from Uranus outward, and this finally stuck. In 1852, Herschel's son John Herschel gave the four then-known moons their names. No other discoveries were made for almost another century. In 1948, Gerard Kuiper at the McDonald Observatory discovered the smallest and the last of the five large, spherical moons, Miranda. Decades later, the flyby of the "Voyager 2" space probe in January 1986 led to the discovery of ten further inner moons. Another satellite, Perdita, was discovered in 1999 after studying old "Voyager" photographs. Uranus was the last giant planet without any known irregular moons, but since 1997 nine distant
Solar System in fiction close to the Sun and its surface was exposed to extremes of temperature. The asteroids were too tiny and airless. By the early 20th century, prospects for life in the Solar System focused on Venus, the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and especially Mars. With the onset of the Space Age, planetary probes cast increasing doubt on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life in the Solar System, at least life of any magnitude greater than organisms such as bacteria. By the mid-1960s, it was firmly established that life could have no foothold on the hostile surfaces of Mercury or Venus,