When the planet is going through turbulent times, there is nothing like long weather and distant areas to get some fresh air. This is what the United States offers us with the publication of their “Ten-Year Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology”. Published this week, the document has all the more resonance as NASA holds it in high esteem. It often influences the strategic and budgetary choices of the American agency.
Thus, after 2035 and the return to Earth of the first Martian samples that the Perseverance rover is currently collecting, after astronauts will have once again set foot on lunar soil (by 2030 if the American Artemis program does not has no delay), it is towards Uranus that American astronomers invite Earthlings to turn. The little knowledge about this huge planet its distance from the sun, its axis of rotation, its magnetic field the composition of its atmosphere make it a priority target.
The constraints of the calendar of these scholars remind us of the ephemeral nature of our human temporalities. The next two firing windows for such an excursion to Uranus send us back to 2031 and 2032. This would allow the probe to reach Uranus in thirteen years, i.e. in 2045. If he is still alive, Vladimir Putin will then have 93 years. It is hoped that he will no longer be in the Kremlin and that the global space adventure will have resumed its normal course with the support of Russian scientists. Because today, if minimal cooperation continues for the international space station, Europe has postponed the ExoMars mission indefinitely. A Russian-European program initiated in the early 2000s and which cost 2 billion euros… Long time and reason are, alas sometimes, the toy of human follies that we would like to be ephemeral.