Miranda (moon) Miranda (moon) Miranda, also designated Uranus V, is the smallest and innermost of Uranus's five round satellites. It was discovered by Gerard Kuiper on 16 February 1948 at McDonald Observatory, and named after Miranda from William Shakespeare's play "The Tempest". Like the other large moons of Uranus, Miranda orbits close to its planet's equatorial plane. Because Uranus orbits the Sun on its side, Miranda's orbit is perpendicular to the ecliptic and shares Uranus's extreme seasonal cycle. At just 470 km in diameter, Miranda is one of the smallest closely observed objects in the Solar System that might be in hydrostatic
Formation and evolution of the Solar System have been forged from the remnants in less violent collisions. Moons around some asteroids currently can only be explained as consolidations of material flung away from the parent object without enough energy to entirely escape its gravity. Moons have come to exist around most planets and many other Solar System bodies. These natural satellites originated by one of three possible mechanisms: Jupiter and Saturn have several large moons, such as Io, Europa, Ganymede and Titan, which may have originated from discs around each giant planet in much the same way that the planets formed from the disc around the Sun.