European space scientists are being asked to work with NASA to pull off one of the most ambitious space missions scheduled to be launched this century.
Astrophysicists say taking part in a robotic spaceflight to the mysterious planet Uranus would offer “the opportunity to take part in a groundbreaking flagship-class mission.”
The phone number is Naturea leading scientific journal Special Edition The report urged the European Space Agency (ESA) to forge an international collaboration with NASA to ensure that the Uranus mission, which would put a robotic spacecraft into orbit around Uranus and drop a probe into its thick, icy atmosphere, is completed on time and on budget.
The mission is expected to take 10 years to develop and 12 to 15 years to reach Uranus after launch.
“The lack of substantial European involvement in this possibly once-in-a-lifetime flagship mission will also undermine the large community of scientists, engineers and technicians working in space exploration across Europe who have a strong interest in the search for planets and extraterrestrial life,” said the commentary’s authors, Olivier Moussis, professor of astrophysics at Aix-Marseille University, and Robin Canup, an American astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The European-US partnership for a Uranus mission is not unprecedented. In 2004, NASA’s robotic spacecraft Cassini entered orbit around Saturn before releasing the ESA-built probe Huygens, which then parachuted into Saturn’s moon Titan, revealing a world with a rough, brittle surface and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. The joint mission is considered a classic example of the benefits of international spaceflight cooperation.
In their editorial, Moussis and Kanup argue that if ESA misses the opportunity to join the Uranus mission, a consortium of individual European countries should be set up to build probes to be released from a workhorse built by the US. The UK, with its strong track record in setting up space collaborations, would be well placed to play a key role in such an endeavour.
Scientists argue that Uranus has characteristics that give it special scientific importance: while the other planets in the solar system spin like a top, Uranus spins on its side, and although it is not the farthest planet from the sun, it is the coldest planet in the solar system.
Uranus has incredibly long seasons: each pole is bathed in constant sunlight for decades, followed by decades of complete darkness. Yet only one space probe has ever visited Uranus: Voyager 2, which flew past the planet in 1986. A featureless pale blue world and a constellation of moons emergeSince then, there have been no visits to Earth.
But that lack of interest is changing: Two years ago, the National Academy of Sciences released a report urging NASA to launch a Uranus probe as a top-priority flagship mission. The academy’s views have been influential, putting pressure on NASA to launch a spacecraft to Uranus in the near future.
There are two key reasons for the motivation to visit Uranus. The first is its regionality. The solar system is made up of three categories of planets: the inner rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, two gas giants further from the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, and then Uranus and Neptune, which are at the edge of the solar system. These are known as ice planets because they are four times the diameter of Earth and contain 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 justify a dedicated probe until astronomers with powerful new telescopes and space probes began studying planets orbiting other stars.
Surprisingly, they found that planets the size of Uranus and Neptune are ubiquitous throughout the galaxy. “Nature loves to make planets this big,” 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 no definitive answer will be available until Uranus is studied in detail. Besides finding evidence to explain why ice giants are common around other stars, the mission also aims to explain why the planet is so cold and its axis of rotation is tilted on its side. Moussis and Kanup emphasize that “the scientific motivation for the Uranus mission is compelling.”
