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Cordelia (moon)

Adapted from Wikipedia · Adventurer experience

Image of the moons Cordelia and Ophelia orbiting Uranus, taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Cordelia is the innermost known moon of Uranus. It was found from pictures taken by Voyager 2 on January 20, 1986. It was called S/1986 U 7 at first. It wasn’t seen again until the Hubble Space Telescope spotted it in 1997. Cordelia is named after the youngest daughter of Lear in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. It is also called Uranus VI.

We do not know much about Cordelia except where it orbits and how big it is. It is about 50 km by 36 km (31 mi by 22 mi). It also has a geometric albedo of 0.06. In the Voyager 2 pictures, Cordelia looks stretched out, with its longest part pointing toward Uranus.

Cordelia helps keep Uranus’s ε ring in place. It acts like a shepherd satellite. Because its orbit is inside Uranus’s synchronous orbit radius, it is slowly moving closer to the planet due to tidal deceleration. Cordelia is also nearly in a 5:3 orbital resonance with another moon called Rosalind.

Images

A colorful image of the planet Uranus taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986, showing the planet's unique appearance in space.
A beautiful view of the planet Jupiter and its four largest moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
A colorful image of Pluto and its moon Charon, showing their unique surface features as captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
An image of the asteroid 243 Ida and its tiny moon Dactyl, taken by the Galileo spacecraft from space.

Related articles

Uranus
Voyager 2
Hubble Space Telescope
William Shakespeare
King Lear

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Cordelia (moon), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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