Titania (moon)

|bgcolor="#ffc0c0" colspan="2"|Discovery|||
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
|bgcolor="010101" colspan="2" align="center"||||
|William Herschel||||
|January 11, 1787||||
|435,910 km||||
|436,300 km||||
|0.0011||||
|8.706 d||||
|0.340° (to Uranus' equator)||||
|Uranus||||
|1577.8 km (0.1237 Earths)||||
|7,820,000 km²||||
|2,057,000,000 km³||||
|3.526 kg (5.9 Earths)||||
|1.72 g/cm³||||
|0.378 m/s<sup>2</sup> (~0.039 g)||||
|0.77 km/s||||
|synchronous||||
|zero||||
|0.27||||
|13.73||||
|{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" border="0"||||
|? K|~60 K|? K|}|
**Titania** is the largest moon of Uranus and the eighth largest moon in the Solar System.

## Discovery

Titania was found on 11 January 1787 by William Herschel. He reported it and Oberon the same year. He later reported four more moons, which turned out to be spurious.

## Name and pronunciation

The names of Titania and the other four moons of Uranus then known were suggested by Herschel's son John Herschel in 1852 at the request of William Lassell. Lassell had found Ariel and Umbriel the year before. He had  supported Herschel's 1847 naming scheme for the seven then-known moons of Saturn and had named his newly-found eighth moon Hyperion in 1848, in accordance with Herschel's naming scheme.

All of the moons of Uranus are named for characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. Titania was named after Titania, the Queen of the Faeries in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. It is also designated **Uranus III**.

## Physical characteristics

So far the only close-up images of Titania are from the _Voyager 2_ probe, which photographed the moon during its Uranus flyby in January, 1986. At the time of the flyby the southern hemisphere of the moon was pointed towards the Sun so only it was studied.

Although what its interior is made up of is uncertain, one model suggests that Titania is made of about 50% water ice, 30% silicate rock, and 20% methane-related organic compounds.

### Surface features

Surface features on Titania are named for characters from plays by William Shakespeare. Chasms on Titania are called chasmata. Escarpments here are called rupes. They are named after the places where plays by Shakespeare happen. craters on Titania are named after female characters in the plays.

A major surface feature is a huge canyon that dwarfs the scale of the Grand Canyon on Earth and is in the same class as the Valles Marineris on Mars or Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys.

|scope="col"|Feature|scope="col"|Named after|scope="col"|Type|scope="col"|Length (diameter), km|scope="col"|Coordinates|
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|Belmont, Italy (_The Merchant of Venice_)|rowspan="2"|Chasma|style="text-align: center;"|238||||||
|Messina, Italy (_Much Ado About Nothing_)|style="text-align: center;"|1,492||||||||
|Roussillon, France (_All's Well That Ends Well_)|Rupes|style="text-align: center;"|402|||||||
|Adriana (_The Comedy of Errors_)|rowspan ="15"|Crater|style="text-align: center;"|50||||||
|Bona (_Henry VI, Part 3_)|style="text-align: center;"|51||||||||
|Calpurnia Pisonis (_Julius Caesar_)|style="text-align: center;"|100||||||||
|Eleanor of Aquitaine (_The Life and Death of King John_)|style="text-align: center;"|74||||||||
|Gertrude (_Hamlet_)|style="text-align: center;"|326||||||||
|Imogen (Cymbeline)|style="text-align: center;"|28||||||||
|Iras (_Antony and Cleopatra_)|style="text-align: center;"|33||||||||
|Jessica (_The Merchant of Venice_)|style="text-align: center;"|64||||||||
|Katherine (_Henry VIII_)|style="text-align: center;"|75||||||||
|Lucetta (_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_)|style="text-align: center;"|58||||||||
|Marina (_Pericles, Prince of Tyre_)|style="text-align: center;"|40||||||||
|Mopsa (_The Winter's Tale_)|style="text-align: center;"|101||||||||
|Phrynia (_Timon of Athens_)|style="text-align: center;"|35||||||||
|Ursula (_Much Ado About Nothing_)|style="text-align: center;"|135||||||||
|Valeria (_Coriolanus_)|style="text-align: center;"|59||||||||

## Occultation

On September 8, 2001, Titania occulted a faint star; this was a chance to both refine its diameter and ephemeris, and to detect any extant atmosphere.  The data revealed no atmosphere to a surface pressure of 0.03 microbars; if it exists, it would have to be far thinner than that of Triton or Pluto.

## Other websites

- Titania Profile  by NASA's Solar System Exploration

## Other websites

- USGS: Titania nomenclature