Verona Rupes: Tallest Known Cliff in the Solar System
Copyright: Public Domain
Model: gpt-4.1-mini
Prompt version: 1.0
Model: gpt-4.1-mini
Prompt version: 1.0
Could you survive a jump off the tallest cliff in the Solar System? Quite possibly.
Verona Rupes on Uranus’ moon Miranda is estimated to be 20 kilometers deep — ten times the depth of the Earth’s Grand Canyon.
Given Miranda’s low gravity, it would take about 12 minutes for a thrill-seeking adventurer to fall from the top, reaching the bottom at the speed of a racecar — about 200 kilometers per hour.
Even so, the fall might be survivable given proper airbag protection.
The featured image of Verona Rupes was captured by the passing Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft in 1986.
How the giant cliff was created remains unknown, but is possibly related to a large impact or tectonic surface motion.