![]() Such a mission would help to unlock the many mysteries of Uranus (stop giggling, this is serious). Related story: Whoa, Uranus Looks Totally Messed Up Right Now A dedicated mission to Uranus, Mandt argues, would appear to be next in line. The 2013 decadal review listed the Mars Sample Return Mission and the Europa Clipper as high priorities, and those missions are now in full-on development mode. A key deficiency identified in the latest decadal review, in which NASA tasks the Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to devise a list of priorities for the coming decade, was the “dearth of knowledge on the ice giants.” The review identified UOP as a high-priority planetary mission, a conclusion reached during previous decadal reviews, as Mandt points out. ![]() ![]() That a dedicated mission to Uranus is badly needed is hardly news. Parked in Uranus’s orbit, the spacecraft would take unprecedented readings of the planet, its many moons, and rings, and also deploy a probe to investigate the chemical cocktail that makes up its murky atmosphere. In her essay, Mandt makes the case for precisely that: a dedicated NASA Uranus orbiter and probe, dubbed UOP. The images that Voyager 2 captured left us wanting more, but it’s now three decades later and we still haven’t made the effort to return. “Because Saturn and Jupiter are mostly hydrogen, we call them the gas giants.” “We call Uranus and Neptune ice giants because they have more of the other, heavier elements relative to hydrogen than either Saturn or Jupiter,” Mandt explained in an email. Like Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are packed with hydrogen and helium, the lightest two elements in the universe. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe flew past Uranus on January 24, 1986, capturing remarkable views of the planet and its moons before continuing on its journey to Neptune-the solar system’s other ice giant-and then to interstellar space. ![]() Indeed, it’s been a minute since our only, brief visit to the distant ice giant. ![]()
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