Exploration of an ice giant
Uranus is a relatively secluded planet, with a grand total of one spacecraft having visited it in the past. This lone ranger, NASA’s Voyager 2 interplanetary probe, flew past the distant ice giant Uranus in 1986 while on its way out of the Solar System. Voyager 2 was able to get within 81,500 kilometres (50,642 miles) of the cloud tops, and its suite of instruments got to work. This flyby provided valuable data of the planet’s atmosphere, rings, moons and magnetic field. This included the discovery of 11 new moons, two new rings and revealed that the planet’s rotation rate is 17 hours and 14 minutes per rotation.
Although no spacecraft is currently exploring Uranus up close, there are preliminary plans in place to head to both Uranus and Neptune. NASA’s PreDecadal Survey Mission Study outlines why Uranus and Neptune should be two of the next targets of exploration and contains a variety of potential orbiters, with a probe that could dive into Uranus’ atmosphere. There could also be an orbiter carrying a payload between 50 and 150 kilograms for flybys of Uranus’ major satellites. There would also be a narrow-angle camera that would be able to image Uranus and its 27 known moons, and possibly discover more.
“We do not know how these planets formed and why they and their moons look the way they do,” says Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There are fundamental clues as to how our Solar System formed and evolved that can only be found by a detailed study of one, or preferably both, of these planets.” Not only could these answers help us understand the evolution of our Solar System, but the knowledge could be applied to exoplanets around the galaxy, as ice giants seem to be extremely common within the Milky Way.