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
A Beautiful Planet does not have a planetary magnetic field. Consequently, "its atmosphere was ripped away from the planet by the solar wind. If you could stand on Mars today, you would find a landscape of lifeless desolation; very cold, and very dry." One of the current challenges in maintaining Earth's planetary "life support system" is global warming. The film shows how Earth's warming climate is causing the Greenland ice sheet to melt, and drives the point home by showing the Jakobshavn Glacier calving an incredibly large number of icebergs in relatively rapid succession as the end of this flowing river of ice