Influential panel’s recommendation makes the ice giant a likely destination for a flagship space mission
The long-neglected planet Uranus might get a visitor for the first time in decades. NASA should send a flagship mission to study the giant planet, says a new report from a panel of US planetary scientists. The agency almost always follows the panel’s advice.
Some planetary scientists have recently called for space agencies to send a major mission to Uranus or Neptune, which was also last visited by Voyager 2, in 1989. Both planets are ‘ice giants’, made up of large amounts of icy material swirling around a small rocky core. But Neptune did not make the cut in the report. “Uranus ranked higher because it is technologically achievable right now,” says Simon.
The mission would explore some of Uranus’s 27 known moons—perhaps Titania and Oberon, which are big enough to have water beneath their icy surfaces, or the pockmarked Phoebe and the mottled Puck. Together, the orbiter and probe “will provide a remarkable breadth of new science”, says Heidi Hammel, vice-president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington DC. “I could go on and on.
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