It may sound funny, but it’s what the scientists want.
The space science community thinks the time is ripe to study Uranus in depth — and they’re being serious. A new report compiled by planetary scientists from across the United States says that sending an interplanetary probe to study the ice giant planet should be considered the top priority for planetary exploration over the next decade.
Additionally, when scientists look at planets outside our Solar System, ice giants like Uranus and Neptune seem to dominate the Universe. And yet, they are the only main planets in our Solar System that we’ve never orbited. “Ice giant-like planets are some of the most common ones out there,” Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech and one of the steering committee members on the Decadal, tells. “We have two in our cosmic neighborhood in our Solar System, and it’s high time we check them out.
Both of those priorities have manifested into actual missions. The Mars rover became NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 and continues to drill up samples of Martian soil. The mission to Europa became NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft designed to periodically zoom by Jupiter’s moon to potentially taste its atmosphere and perhaps pass through plumes of water that might erupt from its surface.
While the Uranus and the Enceladus missions are the top new missions for the Decadal authors, they’ve also included a list of recommendations for space missions already taking place that they want to see continue. For instance, they strongly recommend that NASA continue to work toward bringing back samples from Mars. The Perseverance rover was just one major step in a long-term plan to dig up samples and then eventually transport them to Earth, where they can be studied in a lab.
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