The last time a probe visited the distant ice giant was in 1986, yet learning more about this cold world could tell us a lot about the galaxy
n the night of 13 March 1781, William Herschel was peering through his telescope in his back garden in New King Street, Bath, when he noticed an unusual faint object near the star Zeta Tauri. He observed it for several nights and noted that it was moving slowly against background stars. The astronomer first thought he had found a comet but later identified it, correctly, as a distant planet. Subsequently named, it was the first planet to be discovered since antiquity.
Despite these astronomical oddities and extremes, surprisingly little effort has been made to get up close to Uranus. Only one robot probe has ever visited it – in 1986 – when the US Voyager 2 craft swept past on its grand tour of the solar system. It revealed a massive, featureless, pale blue world with an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and methane, a rich family of moons and a powerful magnetic field. And that has been that.
These features were always considered interesting though not sufficiently intriguing to deserve special attention – until astronomers began to study worlds around other stars and found ice giants like Uranus and Neptune were everywhere. “It is really intriguing: when we look at planets around other stars, we find a great many of them are similar to Uranus and Neptune,” adds Fletcher.
The launch of the rocket carrying the Voyager 2 probe from Cape Canaveral, Florida, 20 August 1977, 16 days before the launch of its twin, Voyager 1.But timing is tight. Celestial mechanics dictate that a Uranus mission will have to be launched in 2031 or 2032 to reach Jupiter at the right time to exploit it for a gravity assist.
“Jupiter, Saturn and even Neptune still have some internal heat and emit more energy into space than they gather from the sun. But not Uranus. All its internal heat seems to have disappeared, possibly because that huge impact turned it inside out so that its hot internal contents ended up on the outside and its heat quickly radiated away into space. We need a probe to resolve issues like these.”
A mission to Enceladus shares many of the complexities that bedevil plans for any mission to a distant gas or ice giant. However, it is also united in a remarkable way to the proposed probe to Uranus. Enceladus was discovered in 1789 – by no less a figure than William Herschel.Herschel’s discovery remembered
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