4/7/2023 0 Comments Neptune orbiterWant more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist. This collapse may have formed a nebula of swirling material, generating tremendous pressures and energy from which our Sun was born. A leading hypothesis is that the solar system began as a massive cloud of interstellar dust and gas that collapsed, perhaps from the shockwave of a supernova triggered by an exploding star. We stand to learn a considerable amount about how these massive planets formed, as well as how our Solar System took shape approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Known as the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP), the mission will most likely involve a cone-shaped probe that will dive down into Uranus's atmosphere, coupled with a kind of satellite that will get stunning, up-close views of Uranus's many moons. The mission to Uranus is still in the early stages of development, but the basic design has already been fleshed out. In other words, as other space missions proceed, Uranus and Neptune are becoming primary next objectives. "It was ranked as the third-highest priority flagship in the 2013–2023 decadal survey, Visions and Voyages, following Mars Sample Return and the Europa Clipper, two missions now well advanced in their development." "The "dearth of knowledge on the ice giants" was identified as a problem of highest priority for resolving in the coming decade," Mandt writes. A trip to Uranus or Neptune emerged as a top contender. In spite of all this work, the survey is a good strategy to really understand what space targets experts think we should concentrate on. The most recent survey spanned the course of a year, in which the surveyors reviewed over 500 white papers, held 176 meetings and sat through more than 300 presentations, all of which were made even more difficult by the early days of the COVID pandemic. Why "diamond rain" could be normal weather across the universeĮvery decade, NASA employs the National Academies of Sciences to survey scientists about the most juicy, intriguing space missions to start planning. "The space science community has waited more than 30 years to explore the ice giants, and missions to them will benefit many generations to come," Mandt writes. Mandt, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, lays out the case for traveling to Uranus, how we'd get there and what we'd potentially learn. In a new editorial in the journal Science by Kathleen E. NASA seems to understand this gap in our knowledge and is prioritizing a mission to Uranus. And given that space probe technology has dramatically improved since then, there's a lot we still don't know about these so-called "ice giants," including how they formed, what their interiors are like, and what role they play in the positions and orbits of the outer planets. When it did, the probe turned up more questions than answers. The one and only spacecraft to visit either of them was the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which briefly zipped by in the late '80s, more than three decades ago. Known as the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, the mission will most likely involve a cone-shaped probe that will dive down into Uranus's atmosphere, coupled with a kind of satellite that will get stunning, up-close views of Uranus's many moons.
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