I will be doing this report over the planet Uranus. I will discuss the geographical properties, the structure and composition over the planet. I will also talk about the moons and other miscellaneous information.

Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. It is the seventh planet from the sun and is twice as far out as the sixth planet, Saturn. The distance Uranus is from the sun is approximate 1.8 billion miles. The equatorial diameter is 31,000 miles. Uranus is very unique in that its axis is tilted at 98 degrees, thus it lies on its side. Uranus orbits the sun once every 84 Earth years. The rotation period is 17.2 hours. Due to the rapid rotation of the planet, the poles are flattened. The density of Uranus is about 1.2 times that of water. Uranus has eleven rings, that are made up of large particles and fine dust and are about ten meters in diameter. These rings were conformed by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1977. Uranus has a total of 15 moons. You can see five moons from Earth, and Voyager 2 discovered an additional ten moons. The largest moon is called Titania, which has a radius of 789 kilometers. It's likely that there are several more tiny satellites within the rings.

Uranus appears to have a pale greenish color which is due to the absorption of red light by methane in the upper atmosphere and high-altitude photochemical smog. It is composed primarily of rock and various ices, with only about 15% hydrogen and very little helium. Uranus is similar to Jupiter and Saturn in that the cores are the same except for the massive liquid metallic hydrogen that is in Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus also does not have a rocky core like Jupiter and Saturn, but rather its material is more or less uniformly distributed. Its core is 10,000 miles in diameter and coated with a layer of ice 5,000 miles thick. Like other gas planets, Uranus has bands of clouds that blow around rapidly, but they are extremely faint. If ammonia does exists it is frozen in clouds at lower levels. The atmosphere of Uranus is composed of 83% hydrogen, 15% helium, and 2% methane. Uranus' magnetic field is odd in that it is not centered on the center of the planet and is tilted almost 60 degrees with respect to the axis of rotation. It is probably generated by motion at relatively shallow depths within Uranus. Uranus is sometimes just barely visible with the naked eye on a very clear night. It is fairly easy to spot with binoculars if you know exactly where to look. You can refer to Sky and Telescope magazine for nightly locations.

I hope that you learned something new about Uranus and found this paper very informing and interesting.

1. Uranus---

http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/uranus.html

2. Uranus---

http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/welcome/uranus.htm

3. Electric Library: Uranus (The Hutchinson Dictionary of Science)

4. Electric Library: Uranus in astronomy (The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition)

5. Beyond Earth and moon: The Planets