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Umbriel, third nearest of the five major moons of Uranus and the one having the darkest and oldest surface of the group. Its discovery is attributed to the English astronomer William Lassell in 1851, although the English astronomer William Herschel, who discovered Uranus and its two largest moons, may have glimpsed it more than a half century earlier. Umbriel was named by Herschel’s son, John, for a character in Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock.

  • Umbriel, the third nearest and darkest of Uranus’s five major moons, in an image made by Voyager 2 …

It orbits Uranus once every 4.144 days at a mean distance of 265,970 km (165,270 miles). Umbriel has a diameter of 1,170 km (727 miles) and a density of about 1.4 grams per cubic cm. The moon appears to be composed of equal parts water ice and rocky material, intermixed with small amounts of frozen methane.

Moons of Uranus
name mean distance from centre of Uranus (orbital radius; km) orbital period (sidereal period; Earth days)* inclination of orbit to planet’s equator (degrees)** eccentricity
of orbit
Cordelia 49,800 0.335 0.085 0.0003
Ophelia 53,800 0.376 0.104 0.0099
Bianca 59,200 0.435 0.193 0.0009
Cressida 61,800 0.464 0.006 0.0004
Desdemona 62,700 0.474 0.113 0.0001
Juliet 64,400 0.493 0.065 0.0007
Portia 66,100 0.513 0.059 0.0001
Rosalind 69,900 0.558 0.279 0.0001
Cupid 74,392 0.613 0.099 0.0013
Belinda 75,300 0.624 0.031 0.0001
Perdita 76,417 0.638 0.47 0.0116
Puck 86,000 0.762 0.319 0.0001
Mab 97,736 0.923 0.134 0.0025
Miranda 129,900 1.413 4.338 0.0013
Ariel 190,900 2.52 0.041 0.0012
Umbriel 266,000 4.144 0.128 0.0039
Titania 436,300 8.706 0.079 0.0011
Oberon 583,500 13.46 0.068 0.0014
Francisco 4,276,000 266.56R (145.22) 0.1459
Caliban 7,231,000 579.73R (140.881) 0.1587
Stephano 8,004,000 677.36R (144.113) 0.2292
Trinculo 8,504,000 749.24R (167.053) 0.22
Sycorax 12,179,000 1288.3R (159.404) 0.5224
Margaret 14,345,000 1687.01 (56.63) 0.6608
Prospero 16,256,000 1978.29R (151.966) 0.4448
Setebos 17,418,000 2225.21R (158.202) 0.5914
Ferdinand 20,901,0000 2887.21R (169.84) 0.3682
name rotation period
(Earth days)***
radius (km) mass
(1020 kg)
mean density (g/cm3)
Cordelia 20
Ophelia 21
Bianca 26
Cressida 40
Desdemona 32
Juliet 47
Portia 68
Rosalind 36
Cupid 5
Belinda 40
Perdita 10
Puck 81
Mab 5
Miranda sync. 235.7 0.66 1.2
Ariel sync. 578.9 13.5 1.67
Umbriel sync. 584.7 11.7 1.4
Titania sync. 788.9 35.2 1.71
Oberon sync. 761.4 30.1 1.63
Francisco 11
Caliban 36
Stephano 16
Trinculo 9
Sycorax 75
Margaret 10
Prospero 25
Setebos 24
Ferdinand 10
*R following the quantity indicates a retrograde orbit.
**Inclination values in parentheses are relative to the ecliptic.
***Sync. = synchronous rotation; the rotation and orbital periods are the same.

The only images of Umbriel’s surface have come from the U.S. Voyager 2 spacecraft’s flyby encounter with the Uranian system in 1986. These show that Umbriel is distinct from the other major moons of Uranus in having no evidence of past tectonic activity. Its surface is uniformly covered with impact craters, most of them large, measuring 100–200 km (60–120 miles) across. Craters of this size could only have been produced early in the history of the solar system, when planetesimal-size impacting bodies existed. Their presence on Umbriel indicates that the moon’s surface was never subsequently reworked by internal processes. The most notable feature of the hemisphere imaged by Voyager is a bright ring, dubbed Wunda, that appears to line the floor of a crater 40 km (25 miles) across.

Learn More in these related articles:

in Uranus (planet)

...was so esteemed that the nonexistence of those moons was not realized until the mid-19th century despite the almost total lack of corroboration by other astronomers.) Two more major moons, Ariel and Umbriel, were discovered by the English astronomer William Lassell in 1851. The names of the four moons come from English literature, taken from characters of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope,...
The four largest moons—Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, and Ariel, in order of decreasing size—have densities of 1.4–1.7 grams per cubic cm. This range is only slightly greater than the density of a hypothetical object that would be obtained by cooling a mixture of solar composition and removing all the gaseous components. The object that remained would be 60 percent ice and 40...
seventh planet in distance from the Sun and the least massive of the solar system ’s four giant, or Jovian, planets, which also include Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. At its brightest, Uranus is just visible to the unaided eye as a blue-green point of light. It is designated by the symbol...
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