Titania
Uranus III
Titania Facts
- Titania is the fourteenth and largest of Uranus's
known satellites:
- distance from Uranus: 436,270 km
- diameter: 1578 km
- mass: 3.49e21 kg
- Pronounced "ti TAY nee uh".
- Titania is the Queen of the Fairies and wife of Oberon in Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream.
- Discovered by Herschel in 1787.
- Titania and Ariel appear quite similar though Ariel
is 25% smaller. All of Uranus's large moons are a mixture of about 40-50%
water ice with the rest rock, a somewhat larger fraction of rock than
Saturn's large moons such as
Rhea.
- Titania's surface is a mixture of cratered terrain and systems of
interconnected
valleys hundreds of kilometers long. Some of the craters appear to
be half-submerged.
Titania's surface is clearly relatively young
(though older
than some such as Enceladus); obviously some sort
of resurfacing processes have been at work.
- One theory of Titania's history is that it was once hot enough to be liquid.
The surface
probably cooled first; when the interior froze it expanded forcing the surface
to crack and resulting in the valleys that we see today.
Pictures
- (above) Titania
54k gif;
21k jpg;
327k gif
Titania
40k gif;
18k jpg
- Titania: color large low res
55k jpg
More about Titania
Open Issues
- Why are Ariel and Titania different from
Umbriel and Oberon?
- Is the expansion-cracking theory right?
... Uranus
... Umbriel
... Titania
... Oberon
... 
Bill Arnett; last updated:
1994 September 21
