An influential panel of American planetary scientists has suggested in a new report that NASA send a spacecraft to Uranus to study the composition of the planet, its rings and its moons.
This comes from a process known as the “decadal survey”, in which NASA provides annual recommendations and guidelines for prioritizing scientific goals.
In a recommendation published by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC, the scientists suggested the importance of sending NASA for a major mission to Uranus.
“This mission will be absolutely transformative,” says Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The “ice giant” Uranus is located 1.925 billion miles from Earth, and has not been a significant planet since 1986, when Voyager 2 flew close to it.
Many experts say this seems like an oversight on the part of NASA given that Uranus is a scientific mystery waiting to be revealed, as it orbits almost entirely on its side and after it has developed a complex magnetic field are things we do not yet understand about the planet.
Scientists believe that Uranus could provide insight into exoplanets outside our solar system because many of them are of similar size and composition, according to Scientific American.
Simone said the most obvious reason for NASA to go to Uranus is that it is technically feasible right now.
The report suggested that a mission to Uranus be launched aboard a commercial “Falcon Heavy” rocket as early as 2031, if fully funded, and the mission could then launch a probe toward Uranus to explore its winds, atmosphere and composition.
Meanwhile, the main spacecraft will make flights to collect data on the magnetic field of Uranus, and some of its 27 likely known moons, Titania and Oberon, which may host water.
“We’re talking about a mission to study the entire Uranus system,” Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Scientific American.
Experts estimated that a mission to Uranus would cost NASA up to $4.2 billion, and some scientists suggested the “New Frontier” mission, which usually costs about $900 million, and the problem with this budget is that it may not yield adequate results.
Lee Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester who was involved in the decadal survey, said: ‘To fully explore Uranus, we need to be in orbit and explore the interior, atmosphere and magnetosphere, tour the moons and countless icy rings, if it’s worth it. Done, it’s worth doing right.”