Influential panel’s recommendation makes the ice giant a likely destination for a flagship space mission.
A US probe to Uranus is the top-priority space mission of an influential group of planetary scientists.The long-neglected planet Uranus might get a visitor for the first time in decades. NASA should send a flagship mission to study the giant planet, says. The agency almost always follows the panel’s advice.
“This mission will be absolutely transformative,” says Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who worked on the 19 April report, published by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC. Uranus is full of scientific mysteries, such as why it rotates nearly on its side and how it developed a complex magnetic field.
The mission would explore some of Uranus’s 27 known moons — perhaps Titania and Oberon, which are big enough to have water beneath their icy surfaces, or the pockmarked Phoebe and the mottled Puck. Together, the orbiter and probe “will provide a remarkable breadth of new science”, says Heidi Hammel, vice-president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington DC. “I could go on and on.
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