Background Information:
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun.
It has a large amount of moons and a small ring system. Uranus' axis is tilted 98 degrees from vertical
which means the planet is laying sideways. It is possible that it was hit early in it's formation by
an object large enough to knock it on it's side. When Voyager 2 flew by in 1986, it's cameras found
a totally featureless cloud system. One moon of Uranus called Miranda, has a very unusual terrain, and
it is possible that it has been shattered several times and reformed.
Uranus Images:
There has been one fly-by mission to Uranus by the
Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. These are a few of the images returned:
Orbital & Mass Data:
- Average Distance from Sun : 2.8696 billion kilometers
- Length of Year : 84.01 Earth years
- Length of Day : 23.9 Earth hours
- Diameter : 52,290 kilometers
- Mass (Earth=1) : 14.54
- Surface Gravity (Earth=1) : 0.79
- Escape velocity : 21.2 kilometers/second
- Average surface temperature : 57 K. at the cloud tops
|
