Verona Rupes

Common card · No. 382561

Verona Rupes is the tallest known cliff on Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and possibly the highest cliff in the Solar System. It was discovered by the Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986. The cliff's mapped northern end is about 23 km south of the equator. Its southern end is about 128 km south. Its centre is about 75 km south. "Verona Rupes" was adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1988, named after the city of Verona, which is the setting for several plays by William Shakespeare. It may have been created by a major impact that caused the moon to disrupt and reassemble, or by the crust rifting due to stress from an internal ocean. The height of the cliff is not known with precision. There are several estimates for its true altitude. Original calculations placed it at between 5 and 10 km (3 and 6 mi) high, while later work assigns larger figures, around 20 km (12 mi). This upper bound would make it the tallest known cliff in the Solar System, a possibility for which...

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