On this day in space: Feb. 16, 1948: Gerard Kuiper Discovers a moon around Uranus

On Feb. 16, 1948, the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus.

a craggy grey moon on a black background — NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft aptured this view of the moon Miranda around Uranus during a flyby of the gas giant during its grand tour of the solar system. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

When Kuiper first spotted Miranda, he was at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, where he used the 82-inch Otto Struve Telescope. Two weeks later, he was able to confirm that the thing he saw was a moon orbiting Uranus.

He chose to name the moon Miranda after a character in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," because the other four moons were also named after Shakespeare characters.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.

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