Now for closer look at Uranus
★ NASA is preparing to bend over backwards and do whatever it takes to grab a cheeky snap of Uranus – 47 years after the Voyager Two mission reached 50,000 miles off the planet’s cloud tops.
As we revealed yesterday, astronauts plan to get to the bottom of planning the mission by 2031.
★ Here KIM CARR reveals 10 things you never knew about Uranus...
1 Peeking through his telescope on March 13, 1781, astronomer Sir William Herschel found more than the Gemini constellation he was expecting when he became the first person to identify Uranus.
2 The German-born composer and astronomer moved to Britain in 1757 when he was 19 and wanted to name his discovery Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) after King George III, who was on the throne at the time.
3 While Herschel wrote about seeing rings around Uranus it took until 1977 before the first of 13 were officially recorded. They are split into two groups – the narrow main rings and the broader dusty rings.
4 English poetry and drama inspired the names of the 27 known moons of Uranus. Nine of them have been given monikers from the works of William Shakespeare including the fifth moon Miranda, from The Tempest, and the sole known outer prograde moon is called Margaret, taken from Much Ado About Nothing. It is thought they are asteroids which got stuck in the planet’s gravity.
5 In 1850 it was officially decided the title would be Uranus, after the Greek God of the sky – the son of Chaos and mate of Gaea (the name for Mother Earth), who hated his offspring and forced them into a prison deep in the Earth. It’s the only planet not named after a Roman God but its Greek counterpart.
6 It takes Uranus around 84 Earth years to get around the Sun and 17.2 hours for a day to pass on the planet.
7 Considering some areas don’t see sunlight for more than 40 years it’s no surprise that Uranus is the coldest planet, with -224 degrees the lowest temperature recorded.
8 Clouds of frozen hydrogen sulphide surround the planet which give off a honking stench similar to rotten eggs and are responsible for its blue-green colour.
9 Like Neptune, Uranus has its own Great Dark Spot – a hurricane where the wind blows up to 560mph in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation.
10 Boffins believe ice giants like Uranus will give us answers to how the solar system formed. In 2022 Professor Leigh Fletcher of Leicester University said: “We think we understand how something gets to be the size of Earth and Venus but we don’t understand how a world can start to grow and grow and not carry on to become Jupiter-mass in size. A mission to Uranus could help us.”