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
Moons of Uranus Moons of Uranus Uranus is the seventh planet of the Solar System; it has 27 known moons, all of which are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus's moons are divided into three groups: thirteen inner moons, five major moons, and nine irregular moons. The inner moons are small dark bodies that share common properties and origins with Uranus's rings. The five major moons are massive enough to have reached hydrostatic equilibrium, and four of them show signs of internally driven processes such as canyon formation and volcanism on their surfaces. The largest of