MIRANDA

the beautiful and naive daughter of Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan, in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Growing up on a largely uninhabited island with her father and Caliban for company, Miranda is so delighted to meet other humans that in the final act she speaks the famous words How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in 't! innermost and smallest of the major satellites of Uranus. It was discovered in 1948 by the American astronomer G.P. Kuiper. Miranda's orbit is elliptical, and on the average it lies about 129,390 km (80,220 miles) from the centre of Uranus. Its orbital period is 1.4135 days. Its estimated diameter is 484 km (300 miles), and its mass is about 0.2 10-5 that of Uranus. Like the other major Uranian satellites, Miranda appears to be composed largely of water ice probably intermixed with frozen methane and rocky material. Photographs taken by the U.S. Voyager 2 space probe in 1986 indicate that Miranda's surface is a patchwork of winding valleys, parallel grooves, fault scarps, and cratered highlands. Such topographical features point to extensive tectonic activity during Miranda's past. state, northern Venezuela, bounded on the northeast by the Caribbean Sea, by the Venezuelan states of Gurico on the south and Aragua on the west, and by the Distrito Federal on the north. The mountainous northern and southern parts of the territory of 3,070 square miles (7,950 square km) are separated by the Tuy River, which flows eastward to the Caribbean. Miranda ranks high among Venezuelan states in agricultural and pastoral production, and government irrigation projects have resulted in the expansion of its large-scale farming and in the diversification of its agriculture. Almost half of the nation's cacao is grown around the Barlovento region of Miranda and neighbouring Anztegui, in the Tuy valley. Coffee plantations cover the higher elevations; sugarcane and citrus trees thrive on the valley floor. The state also produces bananas, corn (maize), peanuts (groundnuts), cassava, and coconuts. Miranda has a high rural population density, and the city of Caracas has expanded into neighbouring parts of northwestern Miranda. The highway network is extensive; Los Teques (q.v.), the state capital and major industrial centre, lies on the Pan-American Highway. Pop. (1986 est.) 1,771,680.