Written by: Alexandra Weitzie
The planet Uranus may be on a date with a visit, which will be the first in decades, after it has been absent from scientists’ attention for a long time. According to a report issued by a committee of American planetary scientists, NASA is supposed to send a pioneering mission to study the giant planet. It is the practice of the Agency to follow the recommendations of this committee most of the time, if not always.
Once launched, the planned Uranus mission will be the first to visit this frigid planet since the “Voyager 2” probe passed it lightly in 1986. And the expedition assigned to this mission may reveal the path of formation and evolution of this planet, its rings and moons, and their evolution in all. over billions of years.
“It will happen,” says Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who worked on the April 19 report for the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C. This mission is a major transformation.” The planet Uranus is full of scientific secrets, including the secret of its rotation on its side in a semi-horizontal axis, as well as the secret of the origin of its complex magnetic field. On a larger scale, the study of the planet Uranus can provide us with information that deepens our understanding of planets orbiting stars other than the sun, because most of the planets that we have been able to observe outside the solar system so far, more than 5,000 planets, are close in size to the size of the planet Uranus.
In the past few years, some planetary scientists have called on space agencies to send major missions to Uranus or Neptune, knowing that the last visitor to Neptune, similar to Uranus, was the Voyager 2 probe, in 1989. However, although the two planets are classified as “Two ice giants”; As both consist of a small rocky core in the middle of a vortex of large amounts of icy material, Neptune was not chosen in the last report that recommended visiting Uranus. Simon explains: “Uranus advances [على نبتون] In the arrangement, given that his visit represents a goal that is technically achievable with the current data.”
A mission to Uranus could be launched aboard one of the commercial Falcon Heavy rockets, a vehicle that is already in operation. An early launch date could be set for the mission, for example, in 2031, which is the earliest that the design and construction of a spacecraft can be completed by that time, if this process is fully funded. As for Neptune, which is farthest from Uranus from Earth, it is possible that sending a mission to it would require a rocket larger than the “Falcon Heavy” rockets, such as the NASA Space Launch System rocket, which has not been launched before.
The report proposes launching a mission that drops a probe towards Uranus in order to investigate the secrets of the planet, including the investigation of the factors responsible for the flow of strong winds that blow through its atmosphere consisting of hydrogen, helium and methane. If this proposal is adopted, the main spacecraft will circle the planet for years, in order to gather observations of a number of the planet’s properties, such as its magnetic field, which may have been involved in powering the planet’s glowing auroras. “The mission we’re talking about is to study the entire Uranus system,” says Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Thus, the proposed mission will also explore some of the 27 moons of Uranus known to us, perhaps choosing Titania and Oberon, both large enough to allow water beneath its icy surface, or the filled Phoebe. With holes and a mottled Puck moon. Heidi Hummel, vice president of science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, DC, expects that the main orbiter and its companion probe “will provide us with a flood of new scientific information and ideas.” She adds, “I can talk more [عن مزايا البعثة] more and more”.
Giant planet and a huge price
If NASA decides to embark on the $4.2 billion Uranus mission, it must find a partner in the European Space Agency (ESA). The European Space Agency had published a long-term study in 2021, to determine its priorities, and it was proposed to launch a partnership with another space agency to study one of the two ice giants.
Lee Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester, UK, says that “the most important question now is whether there is room for such an ambitious partnership, given the extent of countries’ limited national budgets and the European Space Agency’s stacked science program plan.” “We will have to wait and see what happens,” he added.
The US report released last April covers many aspects of planetary exploration and is likely to guide decisions that will be made by NASA and the US National Science Foundation for years to come. The report placed second on its list of pioneering planetary mission priorities, with the proposed Uranus mission spearheading a probe into Saturn’s moon Enceladus, a moon that spouts fountains of water gushing out from a buried ocean. That mission will send a lander to the surface of Enceladus to collect sediment from one of its fountains, and examine it for any signs of life there.
NASA’s Efforts to Observe Space Rocks Under Scrutiny
The report analyzes for the first time NASA’s preparations to protect Earth from deadly asteroids. The report advised the agency to launch a mission to detect near-Earth asteroids as soon as possible, a project that NASA announced that it will be running for two years, until 2028, so that it can save money.
The report also highlights the unfortunate decline in the values of equity and inclusion in the US field of planetary science, and notes that scientists from racial and ethnic minorities frequently face discrimination, and that planetary exploration missions do not reflect the cultural diversity needed in choosing their leaders. Also, the percentage of scientists who submitted proposals to NASA to launch planetary missions between 2014 and 2020, and defined themselves as belonging to underrepresented groups in this field, does not exceed 5%. The report notes that the past decade “has witnessed a shocking stagnation in efforts to bring about change”.