The Planet of Doubt Jupiter and Saturn and on the surface of Uranus itself. At the time "The Planet of Doubt" takes place at the turn of the 22nd century, the limited range of the spaceships ensures that Uranus can only be reached from the American base on Titan when Saturn reaches conjunction with Uranus, an event that occurs once every forty years. The Young expedition explored the planet's south pole in 2060; now Hammond takes his ship, the "Gaea", to the north pole. Finding an ocean at the north pole, Hammond sends the "Gaea" spiraling southeast until they reach land. They find the
Moons of Uranus the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"). The reasoning was presumably that Uranus, as god of the sky and air, would be attended by spirits of the air. Subsequent names, rather than continuing the airy spirits theme (only Puck and Mab continued the trend), have focused on Herschel's source material. In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer Gerard Kuiper after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest". The current IAU practice is to name moons after characters from Shakespeare's plays