‘Once in a lifetime’: UK and European space scientists urged to join Nasa mission to Uranus | Space
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European space scientists were urged to join forces with NASA to ensure the success of one of the most ambitious space missions planned for launch this century.
Join a robot space flight to the mysterious planet Uranus will offer “an opportunity to participate in a ground-breaking, flagship-class mission,” astrophysicists said.
The call was made in Naturethe leading scientific journal, in a special edition who called on the European Space Agency (ESA) to form an international partnership with NASA. Such cooperation will ensure that the Uranus mission – which will involve placing a robotic spacecraft into orbit around the planet and launching a probe into its thick, icy atmosphere – will be completed on time and on budget.
The mission will take 10 years to develop and 12-15 years to reach Uranus after launch.
Authors of the editorial, Olivier Mouzis, professor of astrophysics at the University of Aix-Marseille, and American astrophysicist Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said: “The lack of substantial European involvement in perhaps the once-in-a-lifetime flagship mission would also undermine the large community of scientists, engineers and technicians involved in space exploration across Europe who have a strong interest in planets and the search for extraterrestrial life.
The creation of a European-American partnership for a mission to Uranus would not be without precedent. in 2004 NASA’s Cassini robotic spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn before launching an ESA-built probe called the Huygens, which then made a parachute landing on the planet Titan’s moon, revealing a world with a crusty, brittle surface and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. The joint mission is considered a classic demonstration of the benefits of international cooperation in spaceflight.
In their editorial, Mousis and Canup argue that if Esa does not jump at the chance to join a Uranus mission, a consortium of individual European countries should be formed to construct the probe that will be released from the main spacecraft. built by USA. Britain, which has a good track record in creating co-operative ventures in space, would be well placed to play a key role in such an endeavour.
Scientists say that Uranus has characteristics that give it special scientific importance. While the rest of the planets in our solar system spin like spinning tops, Uranus lies on its side. And although it is not the farthest planet from the sun, it is the coldest in the solar system.
Uranus also experiences seasons of incredible length. Each pole spends decades bathed in continuous sunlight, followed by decades of total darkness. Yet only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus: in 1986 Voyager 2 passed by, revealing a featureless pale blue world with a family of moons. There have been no visits to Earth since.
However, this lack of interest is about to change. Two years ago, the US National Academy of Sciences published a report calling for NASA to launch a Uranus probe as a priority flagship mission. The academy’s views have enormous influence, and it puts NASA under pressure to launch a spacecraft to Uranus in the near future.
There are two key reasons behind wanting to visit Uranus. The first is local. The solar system consists of three categories of planets: the rocky inner worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars; two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, which lie farther from the sun; and then, at the edge of the solar system, Uranus and Neptune. They are known as ice giants because they are four times the diameter of Earth and have large amounts of methane, water and other ice-forming molecules in their atmospheres.
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This last feature was always considered intriguing, but not interesting enough to warrant a dedicated probe until astronomers, armed with a range of powerful new telescopes and space probes, began studying planets that orbit other stars.
To their surprise, they discovered that planets the size of Uranus and Neptune seem to be ubiquitous in our galaxy. “Nature likes to create planets of this size,” Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the magazine. Science.
The question – and the second key reason for the mission – is why? Many theories have been put forward, but until Uranus is studied in detail, no definitive answers will be given. As well as finding evidence that could explain why ice giants are common around other stars, the mission will aim to explain why the planet is so cold and its spin axis is tilted to the side. Mousis and Canup insist, “The scientific case for a mission to Uranus is compelling.”
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