PASADENA, CALIF. — The stunning close-up photographs of the Uranian planetary system taken by the remarkable Voyger 2 spacecraft Sunday have revealed that Miranda, one of Uranus` moons, is the most bizarre object discovered in the solar system so far.
But if Miranda--about 310 miles across--is the weirdest, Uranus` four other large moons are not far behind, said scientists at NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who admit they are dumbfounded by the spectacular findings.
``No one could have anticipated, even in an approximate way, the exotic nature of Uranus` moons,`` said Laurence A. Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Planetary geologists were stunned at the first close-up views of Uranus`
five large moons sent back over a distance of 1.84 billion miles. Uranus is so far away that radio signals traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, take 2 hours and 45 minutes to reach Earth.
The pictures showed at least 10 different geological processes at work that produced such striking features as huge glacierlike flows, a gigantic formation that looks like a stack of pancakes, a giant slidelike formation and valleys and mountains that may be up to 30 miles high.
Miranda, which is named after a character in Shakespeare`s ``Tempest``
who appropriately described a ``brave new world,`` is so wild that scientists may never be able to figure out what happened to it.
``There is nothing else like Miranda in the solar system,`` Soderblom said. ``You have to compare it with strange and bizarre places on other moons around other planets . . . it`s all of these strange places rolled into one.`` Miranda, he said, is a bizarre hybrid of the valleys of Mars, the chaotic terrain of Jupiter`s moon, Ganymede, and the compression faults of Mercury.
``If you can imagine taking all the bizarre geological features in the solar system and putting them on one place, you`d have Miranda,`` Soderblom said.
The joy of the JPL scientists over the fantastically successful mission to the most distant object in the solar system ever visited by a manmade robot, however, was saddened somewhat by the realization that Uranus may not be visited again for many lifetimes.
``Voyager has given us our knowledge about Uranus for the next two centuries,`` said Burton Edelson, associate administrator for space science and application for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
``There will most likely not be another mission to Uranus for a couple hundred years,`` he said. ``So this is it.``
Voyager 2 and a sister ship, Voyager 1, were launched in the summer of 1977 to take advantage of a rare alignment of the four giant outer planets`
gravitational fields to fling the robots from one planet to another.
Voyager 2 passed Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1981 before heading on to Uranus. The spacecraft is now headed for Neptune, which it will reach in August, 1989. Voyager 1 parted company with its companion ship after passing Jupiter and took a course upward out of the plane of the ecliptic. It will not visit any more planets.
Arthur Lane of the JPL said that radio measurements taken when Voyager flew behind Uranus revealed evidence for 10 more extremely thin rings. These rings appear to be only 120 to 150 feet wide and may be only partial rings, he said.
Confirming the partial rings would bring the total number of rings around Uranus to 20.
Soderblom said Uranus` five large moons are unique in the solar system because their degree of strangeness varies from the relatively normal outermost moon, Oberon, to the completely puzzling innermost Miranda.
``As we move closer to Uranus we see an increasing ferocity in the way the moons have been tectonically shuffled,`` he said.
Oberon, 1,010 miles in diameter, appears more like the Earth`s moon, covered with many craters and little geological activity.
Titania, about 995 miles in diameter, also appears cratered, but Umbriel, 690 miles wide, is the darkest of the moons and consequently little is yet known about it.
Ariel, the 825-mile-wide moon nearest Miranda, however, shows mysterious fracture patterns, deep cracks, crustal movememts, valleys and faults, Soderblom said.
The most striking feature on Ariel is what appears to be a flowing river of ice that would be a huge glacier on Earth, he said.
One of Uranus` puzzles scientists think they may have solved is the darkness of the surfaces of its moons. The planet`s strong magnetic field may be bombarding the surfaces with proton particles, which has the effect of toasting the surface, said S. M. Drimigis, of Johns Hopkins University.