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Cupid (moon)

Moon of Uranus

Field	Value
name	Cupid
mpc_name	Uranus XXVII
pronounced
adjectives	Cupidinian
image	Cupidmoon.png
discoverer	Mark R. Showalter and Jack J. Lissauer
discovered	August 25, 2003
semimajor	74,392 km
eccentricity	0.0013
period	0.618 d
inclination	0.1° (to Uranus's equator)
satellite_of	Uranus
mean_radius
surface_area	~1,000 km2
volume	~3,000 km3
mass	~
density	0.5–1.2 g/cm
surface_grav	~– m/s2
escape_velocity	~– km/s
rotation	synchronous
axial_tilt	0
albedo	0.08 (assumed)
single_temperature	~64 K

Cupid is an inner satellite of Uranus. It was discovered by Mark R. Showalter and Jack J. Lissauer in 2003 using the Hubble Space Telescope. It was named after a character in William Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens.

Cupid is one of the smaller known inner Uranian satellites, crudely estimated to be only about 18 km in diameter. This and the dark surface made it too dim to be detected by the Voyager 2 cameras during its Uranus flyby in 1986.

The orbit of Cupid is separated by only 863 km from the orbit of the larger moon Belinda. Unlike Mab and Perdita, two Uranian satellites also discovered in 2003, it does not seem to be perturbed. Despite this, it has the least stable orbit of Uranus's inner moons—it is likely to collide with Belinda in the next 100,000–10 million years, due to resonance interactions that cause the smaller Cupid to drift into a more dangerous orbit over this timescale.

Cupid is at most 500 million years old.

Following its discovery, Cupid was given the temporary designation S/2003 U 2. It is also designated Uranus XXVII.

References

| access-date = 2011-11-02

| access-date = 2006-08-05

References

Gifford & Dyce (1833) ''Some account of Shirley and his writings'', p. 46
(August 2012). "Cupid is doomed: An analysis of the stability of the inner uranian satellites". Icarus.
Ćuk, Matija. (2022-07-16). "Cupid is not Doomed Yet: On the Stability of the Inner Moons of Uranus". The Astronomical Journal.

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