It has been more than 37 years since NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft approached the planet Uranus. The planetary scientist lays out the reasons why we should explore it now.
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Uranus is the rarest planet in the solar system. It is an ice giant with strange rings and an unusual tilt. The planet is tilted to the plane of its orbit at an angle of 97.86 degrees and rotates retrograde, “lying on its side slightly upside down.” It’s really a mystery to us, because all we know about it is thanks to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which made a fleeting flight to this planet in January 1986 on its way to Neptune.
In a new study published in the journal Science, planetary scientist Kathleen Mandt of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (USA) argues that we should return to Uranus, and the best time for this is 2032, when the spacecraft can receive a gravitational momentum from Jupiter. Therefore, it is necessary to begin preparations now and seek funds to carry out the mission.
The fact is that, being so far away, it takes a lot of energy to deliver a spacecraft to the ice giants in a minimum amount of time, and this is why it is necessary to rely on the gravity of the planets.
We have to consider that even with the technology that existed back in the 1970s, scientists were able to send Voyager 2 to both Uranus and Neptune through the use of planetary alignment.
Images taken by Voyager 2 in 1986 raised many questions among astronomers about this planet, but three decades have passed and we still have not made any effort to answer them.
According to the expert, now is the right time to prepare for a flight to Uranus, because the next window for the launch of the probe will appear in 2032, when the alignment of Jupiter with the Earth will allow to maneuver towards Uranus. While in orbit around Uranus, the spacecraft must obtain unprecedented data on the planet, its many moons and rings, and deploy a probe to study the chemistry that makes up its hazy atmosphere.
If the mission had been launched in 2032, then the spacecraft would have reached Uranus by about 2050.
Uranus is considered an ice giant, with most of its atmosphere made up of two elements: helium and hydrogen. It also has 27 satellites that orbit the planet following its odd tilt relative to its orbital path. The tilt also gives the planet extreme seasonal fluctuations as it takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.
Earlier, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward a hypothesis according to which there could be life on the moons of Uranus.
