Verona Rupes, a cliff about 20 km high, is located on Miranda, a moon of Uranus.
The feature was discovered in images returned by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft during its Uranus encounter in January 1986. It appears as a dramatic scarp on Miranda’s heavily fractured, patchwork-like surface. Estimates of its height vary, but the largest figures reach roughly 20 km, making it a possible contender for the tallest known cliff in the Solar System.
Miranda is the innermost and smallest of Uranus’s five major moons. Its surface contains enormous grooves, faults, and three prominent coronae—large, oval tectonic regions that give the moon its distinctive “Frankenstein” appearance. Scientists think tidal heating, orbital resonances, impacts, or crustal rifting may have helped produce this unusual terrain.
The name Verona Rupes comes from Verona, the Italian city associated with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “Rupes” is a planetary-geology term for an escarpment or cliff. A common mix-up is to attribute the feature to Ariel or Titania, other major Uranian moons; the Voyager images place it on Miranda.