Verona Rupes on Uranus’ moon Miranda is the steepest cliff in the solar system, with a 12-mile elevation gain. Miranda’s surface is strange and fuzzy due to intense tectonic activity, and Verona Rupes cuts 4% into the moon’s surface. A skydiver with padding or airbags could survive a jump from the summit, falling for 12 minutes at about 125 mph. Voyager 2 discovered Verona Rupes in 1986.
The steepest cliff in the solar system is Verona Rupes, on Miranda, a moon of the outer planet Uranus. Verona Rupes is a 12-mile (20km) elevation gain. For comparison, the Grand Canyon is a 1-mile cliff and Mt. Everest is five miles high. In astrogeology, a “rupes” is a long line of mountainous cliffs. Verona Rupes is a cliff named after Verona in Italy. It was so named because Verona is the setting for Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, and moons and features in the Uranian system are traditionally named after things in Shakespeare’s plays.
Verona Rupes’ height is sometimes erroneously given as 5 km (3 miles), although its height is obviously greater than this, as a cursory look at a picture of the moon itself shows. The cliff is even more intimidating in the context of the small moon it sits on: Miranda is only 400 km (250 mi) in diameter. Some simple calculations then show that Verona Rupes is a cliff so deep that it cuts 4% of the way into the surface of the moon. A similar cliff on Earth would be 1,000 miles deep!
The tallest cliff in the solar system isn’t the only unusual thing found on Miranda’s surface. The entire surface is strange and fuzzy, with so many deep scratches that it looks like someone threw it in a blender. Scientists believe this pattern is due to intense tectonic activity in Miranda’s past, caused by tidal heating in its core as its orbit changed. An earlier, but now widely discounted hypothesis was that at some point in Miranda’s past, it had been hit by one or more asteroids so hard that the entire planet was blown up, only to condense back together after a few years or decades. While that’s a fantastic-sounding hypothesis, scientists now consider it unlikely.
Many want to know: if you had to jump from the summit of Verona Rupes, would you survive? The answer is probably yes, if you’ve included padding or airbags. Due to the small moon’s low gravity, it would take about 12 minutes for it to fall to the bottom. The skydiver would arrive at the bottom at a speed of about 200 km/h (125 mph), about that of a very fast car. Surrounded by a large inflated ball, this would have survived. The size wouldn’t help slow your descent: without an atmosphere, there would be no friction with the air.
Verona Rupes was discovered by Voyager 2 during its flyby of Uranus in January 1986. This surface feature is too small and too distant to be resolved with current telescopes.
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