The seventh planet from the Sun is as mysterious as it is elusive, prompting astronomers to press for the first dedicated mission to the ice giant.
That a dedicated mission to Uranus is badly needed is hardly news. A key deficiency identified in the latest decadal review, in which NASA tasks the Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to devise a list of priorities for the coming decade, was the “dearth of knowledge on the ice giants.” The review identified UOP as a high-priority planetary mission, a conclusion reached during previous decadal reviews, as Mandt points out.
UOP could study Uranus’s magnetosphere and provide fresh insights into the planet’s internal structure . And then there are Uranus’s many moons to consider.“The moons of Uranus are much smaller than the four large moons of Jupiter and Saturn’s moon Titan. They should be solid and inactive because they are small, and the surfaces should only show impact craters,” Mandt wrote to me.
Indeed, Uranus may host a moon or two with liquid water hidden beneath an icy shell. Astrobiologists should be licking their chops for a chance to investigate the Uranus system from up close. document, released as part of the 2022 planetary science decadal survey. The plan calls for UOP to launch by 2032 to take advantage of Jupiter’s immense gravity, whereby the gas giant would slingshot the spacecraft toward its final destination. UOP would reach Uranus around 2050.
“For the probe, the most important instrument is a mass spectrometer. This instrument is able to measure which elements and molecules are in the atmosphere based on their mass,” she replied. “We need this information to figure out where Uranus formed and how much it migrated after forming. The orbiter will need a combination of instruments that include cameras that measure different wavelengths and sensors that detect electrons, ions, and the magnetic field.
The mission would also present some unique challenges, as no orbiter has worked so far from home. At distances reaching nearly 20 times more than Earth’s distance to the Sun, signals from UOP would take over three hours to reach ground stations on Earth; this “will make planning important with sending commands and require patience when waiting for new results,” Mandt told me. Collecting sufficient solar energy could also prove challenging.
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