Ariel is the brightest and third most massive of the 27 known moons of Uranus. Discovered on 24 October 1851 by William Lassell, it is named for a sky spirit in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and Shakespeare's The Tempest. Like its parent planet, Ariel orbits on its side, giving it an extreme seasonal cycle. As of 2011, almost all knowledge of Ariel derives from a single flyby of Uranus performed by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986, which managed to image 35% of the moon's surface. There are no plans at present to return to study the moon in more detail. After Miranda, Ariel is the second-smallest of Uranus's five round satellites, and the second-closest to its planet. Among the smallest of the Solar System's 19 known spherical moons (it ranks 14th among them in diameter), Ariel is composed of roughly equal parts ice and rocky material. Like all of Uranus's moons, Ariel probably formed from an accretion disk that surrounded the planet shortly after its formation, and, like other large moons, it may be differentiated, with an inner core of rock surrounded by a mantle of ice. Ariel has a complex surface comprising extensive cratered terrain cross-cut by a system of scarps, canyons and ridges. The surface shows signs of more recent geological activity than other Uranian moons, most likely due to tidal heating.
Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_%28moon%29
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1846:
Belgian clarinetist Adolphe Sax received a patent for the saxophone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/saxophone
1895:
The United States Court of Private Land Claims ruled that the title claimed by James Reavis to 18,600 sq mi (48,000 km2) in present-day Arizona and New Mexico was "wholly fictitious and fraudulent". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Reavis
1914:
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip during a motorcade in Sarajevo, sparking the outbreak of World War I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria
1969:
In response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, groups of gay and transgender people began to riot against New York City Police officers, a watershed event for the worldwide gay rights movement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
1981:
Seventy-three leading officials of Iran's Islamic Republic Party were killed when a bomb exploded at the party's headquarters in Tehran. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafte_Tir_bombing
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
affect (n): (psychology) A subjective feeling experienced in response to a thought or other stimulus; mood, emotion, especially as demonstrated in external physical signs http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/affect
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
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