Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: What is Miranda really like? Visually, old images from NASA's Voyager 2 have been recently combined and remastered to result in the featured image of Uranus's 500-kilometre-wide moon. In the late 1980s, Voyager 2 flew by Uranus, coming close to the cratered, fractured, and unusually grooved moon -- named after a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Scientifically, planetary scientists are using old data and clear images to theorize anew about what shaped Miranda's severe surface features. A leading hypothesis is that Miranda, beneath its icy surface, may have once hosted an expansive liquid water ocean which may be slowly freezing. Thanks to the legacy of Voyager 2, Miranda has joined the ranks of Europa, Titan, and other icy moons in the search for water, and, possibly, microbial life, in our Solar System.