Did you know that a moon can be just as interesting as a planet ? 
William Herschel was well known for being an innovator in the 18th century astronomy community, and thanks to his contributions, the world now knows about one of Uranus’ most interesting moons, Titania, whose fun facts separated it from the rest. Did you know it is made up of roughly equal parts of ice and rock? Another reason is that its orbit is completely within this planet’s magnetosphere, a feature which caught our attention, and its orbital location, because of being the farthest moon from Uranus.
In 1986, Voyager 2 got closer to Uranus and took pictures of its moons. One of them was Titania, which is considered as its biggest moon and whose orbit is parallel to the equator of this planet, whereby one part always looks at the sun, while the other part is in full darkness, meaning that both north and south poles are subjected to extreme temperatures. Even though, there are also other characteristics that we don’t know about yet, since the moon could evolve geologically, making us believe that it is in a constant process of internal expansion, which leads us to the following questions:
Does Titania harbor any kinds of biological processes? Does it have a liquid layer? How long has it existed?
There are no confirmed answers yet to the previous questions; however, if NASA sent a probe to investigate the moon, we could know how long the moon has existed, since the accretion disk and likewise know how much it has evolved over time. We would also rule out the probability of water sources that indicate it can be potentially habitable, considering the amount of ammonia that it stores, that may conclusively indicate that not only on planet Earth water can be found, but also on moons.
By Catalina Botero
and Andrés Díaz,
Step 9 Blue.
