Cupid (moon)
moon of Uranus
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. Following its discovery, Cupid was given the temporary designation S/2003 U 2. It is also designated Uranus XXVII. It was named after a character in William Shakespeare's play Timon of Athens.
Cupid orbits within a group of moons called the Portia group, satellites that orbit very close together and have similar physical properties. It orbits particularly close to Belinda and Perdita; the orbit of Cupid is separated by only 863 km (536 mi) from the orbit of the larger moon Belinda.
Cupid is thought to have one of the least stable orbits of Uranus's inner moons. A 2012 study deemed it 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. However, a later analysis in 2022 indicated that Cupid's orbit is protected by a 44:43 orbital resonance between Belinda and Perdita, so it is likely to survive for at least 50 million years. Contradicting this, another study in 2022 found that Belinda and Perdita were not in the resonance, and that Cupid is not likely to survive the next 50,000 years.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cupid (moon)” as moon of Uranus. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15655. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2012 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cupid (moon)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.