Miranda Fractures, Grooves and Craters

This Voyager 2 image of Miranda was taken Jan 24, 1986, from a distance of about 31,000 kilometers (19,000 miles), shortly before the spacecraft's closest approach to the Uranian moon. The high resolution of 600 meters (2,000 feet) reveals a bewildering variety of fractures, grooves and craters, as well as features of different albedos (reflectancea). This clear-filter, narrow-angle view encompasses areas of older, heavily cratered terrain with a wide variety of forms. The grooves and troughs reach depths of a few kilometers (or miles) and expose materials of different albedos. The great variety of directions of fractures and troughs, and the different densities of impact craters on them, signify a long, complex geologic evolution of this satellite. The Voyager project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.