ORBIT Solar System Explorer

Natural satellite Titania

Titania

Great canyons record an expanding shell

A world of ice and rock. Huge faults and canyons suggest internal evolution once stretched its outer shell.

Rendered view of Titania
Illustrative lighting and viewpoint · Image credits
Mean radius
788.9 km
Mean diameter
1,577.8 km
Orbital semimajor axis
436,298 km

01 / Overview

Meet Titania

Titania, Uranus's largest moon, is a world of ice and rock. Great faults and canyons show that its outer shell has stretched. Expansion as internal water froze is one possible explanation. Surface photographs offer clues, but cannot by themselves determine the complete history of the deep interior.

02 / Key data

Core parameters

Mean radius
788.9 km
Mean diameter
1,577.8 km
Orbital semimajor axis
436,298 km
Orbital period
8.706 d
Parent planet
Uranus
Data and calculation notes

Radii are mean values; orbital data describe each world’s scale and motion.

03 / Further reading

A closer look

What makes this world distinctive5
  • Titania is Uranus's largest moon.

  • William Herschel discovered Titania in 1787.

  • Titania has enormous faults and canyons.

  • Titania is named after the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

  • Titania's crust may have stretched as its interior froze and expanded.

Gravity and the interior14
  • A natural satellite forms naturally and orbits a larger body; an artificial satellite is built by people.

  • Tidal locking matches rotation to orbital motion; it does not mean no rotation.

  • A moon's orbit need not lie in the same plane as its planet's orbit around the Sun.

  • Differences in gravity across a moon can deform it through tides.

  • Repeated tidal deformation can turn orbital energy into internal heat.

  • Orbital resonance means periods near simple integer ratios, allowing repeated pulls between moons to build up.

  • Some moons formed in discs around planets; others may have been captured later.

  • Small moons are often irregular because their gravity cannot overcome the strength of their materials.

  • Large moons tend to be rounder because gravity shapes them.

  • Icy moons may have liquid oceans under their shells; a frozen surface does not mean a fully frozen interior.

  • Finding water or organic molecules is not the same as finding life.

  • A planet and moon both orbit their common center of mass; the heavier body's wobble is usually smaller.

  • Other bodies perturb a moon's orbit; a fixed ellipse is only an approximation.

  • Moons can be larger than some planets; classification is not based on diameter alone.

Surface and observation11
  • A world of ice and rock. Huge faults and canyons suggest internal evolution once stretched its outer shell.

  • A moon's visible brightness usually comes from reflected sunlight.

  • Moons have sunlit and dark sides too; the side facing away from the planet is not permanently dark.

  • Crater counts help estimate surface ages, but resurfacing and the impact environment also matter.

  • A moon hiding a background star causes an occultation, useful for measuring size or probing an atmosphere.

  • A moon entering its planet's shadow experiences an eclipse, depending on the orbits' spatial alignment.

  • Tiny changes in a spacecraft's speed can reveal a moon's mass and gravity field.

  • Composition, grain size, and lighting all affect surface color; enhanced-color images differ from naked-eye views.

  • The day–night boundary is the terminator; long shadows nearby bring out terrain.

  • Surfaces with little or no atmosphere lack strong weather erosion and preserve old impact scars more easily.

  • A moon's observed phases come from changing angles between the Sun, moon, and observer.

04 / Sources

Trusted sources

NASA Science — TitaniaJPL — Orbital data

Image credits

Images reproject and light existing textures; they are not live observations.

Surface texture:ItzImcool; Paul Schenk; NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk · License · Rendered by ORBIT

Share this profile

Keep the texture credits and license when reusing an image. Image credits