04-20-2022, 03:01 PM
....I didn't write that headline....
Sending a probe to Uranus labeled as top priority by space science community
....The space science community thinks the time is ripe to study Uranus in depth — and they’re being serious. A new report compiled by planetary scientists from across the United States says that sending an interplanetary probe to study the ice giant planet should be considered the top priority for planetary exploration over the next decade.
Specifically, scientists are calling on NASA to create the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP. The mission concept would send a spacecraft into orbit around Uranus, along with a probe that would plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists envision such a mission launching sometime in the early 2030s as long as engineers get started on it as soon as next year.
If it works, the UOP mission could provide the most intricate details yet about this mostly unexplored world. The only spacecraft to ever visit Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, which flew by the planet in 1986, coming within 50,700 miles of the planet’s cloud tops. Voyager 2 unlocked some intriguing secrets about Uranus, discovering new moons and rings around the planet. But Voyager 2 didn’t stay for long; it zoomed by during its exploration of the outer Solar System and kept going, eventually heading off into interstellar space.
An orbiter and a probe could provide a wealth of additional knowledge. Most of all, they could tell us exactly what Uranus is made of. Scientists believe the planet mainly consists of some combination of rock, ices, and hydrogen and helium, but that hasn’t really been confirmed. “Our understanding of the interior structure of the planet is so poor that we really have very little idea what the ratio of those three things are to each other,” Jonathan Fortney, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who authored a report about possible missions to Uranus and Neptune, tells The Verge. “And so there’s been a long assumption that it’s mostly these ices but that’s that’s literally an assumption. We don’t really know that.”
Additionally, when scientists look at planets outside our Solar System, ice giants like Uranus and Neptune seem to dominate the Universe. And yet, they are the only main planets in our Solar System that we’ve never orbited. “Ice giant-like planets are some of the most common ones out there,” Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech and one of the steering committee members on the Decadal, tells The Verge. “We have two in our cosmic neighborhood in our Solar System, and it’s high time we check them out.”
The Uranus mission is at the top of a long wishlist detailed today in what is known as the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, it’s a massive document written every 10 years or so by groups of planetary scientists detailing the space missions they’d most like to see happen a decade into the future. The Decadal Survey is done so infrequently because of the extensive amount of time it takes to plan and build a flagship interplanetary spacecraft, often requiring roughly a decade of work to execute.
Because it takes so long to pull off a space mission, scientists have to be strategic about their asks, ranking the missions they want to happen in order of highest to lowest priority. The Uranus mission was actually first recommended in 2011 during the last Decadal Survey, but the spacecraft was listed as the third-highest priority behind a Mars rover designed to look for signs of life on the Red Planet and a spacecraft to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, thought to harbor a liquid water ocean underneath its surface.
Both of those priorities have manifested into actual missions. The Mars rover became NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 and continues to drill up samples of Martian soil. The mission to Europa became NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft designed to periodically zoom by Jupiter’s moon to potentially taste its atmosphere and perhaps pass through plumes of water that might erupt from its surface. As of now, Europa Clipper is slated to launch in October of 2024, with its arrival at Europa scheduled for 2030......
NASA wants to probe.......Uranus......?!
Sending a probe to Uranus labeled as top priority by space science community
....The space science community thinks the time is ripe to study Uranus in depth — and they’re being serious. A new report compiled by planetary scientists from across the United States says that sending an interplanetary probe to study the ice giant planet should be considered the top priority for planetary exploration over the next decade.
Specifically, scientists are calling on NASA to create the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP. The mission concept would send a spacecraft into orbit around Uranus, along with a probe that would plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists envision such a mission launching sometime in the early 2030s as long as engineers get started on it as soon as next year.
If it works, the UOP mission could provide the most intricate details yet about this mostly unexplored world. The only spacecraft to ever visit Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, which flew by the planet in 1986, coming within 50,700 miles of the planet’s cloud tops. Voyager 2 unlocked some intriguing secrets about Uranus, discovering new moons and rings around the planet. But Voyager 2 didn’t stay for long; it zoomed by during its exploration of the outer Solar System and kept going, eventually heading off into interstellar space.
An orbiter and a probe could provide a wealth of additional knowledge. Most of all, they could tell us exactly what Uranus is made of. Scientists believe the planet mainly consists of some combination of rock, ices, and hydrogen and helium, but that hasn’t really been confirmed. “Our understanding of the interior structure of the planet is so poor that we really have very little idea what the ratio of those three things are to each other,” Jonathan Fortney, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who authored a report about possible missions to Uranus and Neptune, tells The Verge. “And so there’s been a long assumption that it’s mostly these ices but that’s that’s literally an assumption. We don’t really know that.”
Additionally, when scientists look at planets outside our Solar System, ice giants like Uranus and Neptune seem to dominate the Universe. And yet, they are the only main planets in our Solar System that we’ve never orbited. “Ice giant-like planets are some of the most common ones out there,” Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech and one of the steering committee members on the Decadal, tells The Verge. “We have two in our cosmic neighborhood in our Solar System, and it’s high time we check them out.”
The Uranus mission is at the top of a long wishlist detailed today in what is known as the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, it’s a massive document written every 10 years or so by groups of planetary scientists detailing the space missions they’d most like to see happen a decade into the future. The Decadal Survey is done so infrequently because of the extensive amount of time it takes to plan and build a flagship interplanetary spacecraft, often requiring roughly a decade of work to execute.
Because it takes so long to pull off a space mission, scientists have to be strategic about their asks, ranking the missions they want to happen in order of highest to lowest priority. The Uranus mission was actually first recommended in 2011 during the last Decadal Survey, but the spacecraft was listed as the third-highest priority behind a Mars rover designed to look for signs of life on the Red Planet and a spacecraft to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, thought to harbor a liquid water ocean underneath its surface.
Both of those priorities have manifested into actual missions. The Mars rover became NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 and continues to drill up samples of Martian soil. The mission to Europa became NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft designed to periodically zoom by Jupiter’s moon to potentially taste its atmosphere and perhaps pass through plumes of water that might erupt from its surface. As of now, Europa Clipper is slated to launch in October of 2024, with its arrival at Europa scheduled for 2030......
NASA wants to probe.......Uranus......?!
miley-laughing001:
