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Moon of Uranus is Demoted
Monday, December 31, 2001
By Jeff Foust
Spaceflight Now

This view of Uranus was acquired by Voyager 2 on January 10, 1986. The blue-green appearance of its atmosphere results from methane and high-altitude photochemical smog. This gas absorbs red wavelengths from the incoming sunlight, leaving the predominant bluish color seen here. Towards the bottom of the image a few clouds can be seen. This image is one of the few Voyager pictures that shows this type of cloud.
Photo Credit: Calvin J. Hamilton.

"Typically, satellites are found within days after the discovery image has been taken,” said Erich Karkoschka, with the University of Arizona at Tucson's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “In this case, the discovery image is more than 13 years old."

In an unusual move, the International Astronomical Union has recently stripped the title of "moon" from a body orbiting Uranus discovered in images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The IAU concluded earlier this month that there is not as yet enough information to confirm that the object, designated S/1986 U 10, is in fact a natural satellite of Uranus. The decision was largely unnoticed until The Planetary Society, a space advocacy and education group, publicized the news on Friday.

Erich Karkoschka, a University of Arizona researcher, discovered the object in May 1999, more than 13 years after Voyager 2 flew by Uranus on its grand tour of the outer solar system. Karkoschka found the body in the public archive of Voyager 2 images as part of a project to compare those images with more recent ones taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object was given the temporary designation S/1986 U 10, indicating it was the 10th moon of Uranus discovered in images taken in 1986.
(More: SpaceflightNow.com Space-News Source)
2001 © The Planetary Society.

Other Coverage:
* The Planetary Society
* CNN.com
* Cosmiverse.com
* Discovery.com

Dan