Miranda: Verona Rupes Options

[Phil Naranjo]

Hi...just wondering if anyone has a reliable source for the height of Miranda's spectacular Verona Rupes fault scarp? Estimates for the height range from 5 km to 20 km.

Thanks,
--Phil

[nprev]

Shooting from the hip, here, I'd call active cryovulcanism unlikely in the modern era. Both the primary body & the other moons are significantly less massive than Jupiter & Saturn (and their own moons), so the tidal forces are correspondingly less as well.

Uranus clearly experienced something during its wild youth; a 98 deg polar inclination doesn't happen for nothing. The fact that its rings & moons are all equatorally coplanar implies that they formed after this event, whatever it was. But I suspect that this was the last & most significant energetic event that ever happened there cause, baby, it's COLD outside.

[Phil Naranjo]

Shooting from the hip, here, I'd call active cryovulcanism unlikely in the modern era. Both the primary body & the other moons are significantly less massive than Jupiter & Saturn (and their own moons), so the tidal forces are correspondingly less as well.

Uranus clearly experienced something during its wild youth; a 98 deg polar inclination doesn't happen for nothing. The fact that its rings & moons are all equatorally coplanar implies that they formed after this event, whatever it was. But I suspect that this was the last & most significant energetic event that ever happened there cause, baby, it's COLD outside.

True...and I think that's been the conventional thinking about the Uranian system. However, just today, this was posted on the Planetary Society blog regarding findings reported at the DSPS 2012 meeting:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...4-dps-day1.html

"...Uranus has a blue ring analogous to Saturn's E ring, which is of course supplied by Enceladus' geysers. Uranus' ring is associated positionally with the satellite Mab, which is way too tiny to have any hope of Enceladus-like activity. She suggested that there has been migration of the moons and/or ring material and that Ariel could originally have been the source and may relatively recently have been geologically active."

Admittedly, Ariel is 20x more massive than Miranda (which is 1.5x less massive than Enceladus). Interesting...