The Mission to an Unloved Planet

Many years have passed since the first humans were sent to space, and from that day people have walked on the moon, spacecraft have been sent to Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and even one is on its way to Pluto which is not considered to be a planet in our solar system. In all these years people never had any missions to a planet that we consider a “weird planet” Uranus. This is why this article “The Mission to an Unloved Planet” has captured my attention; a group of scientists from around the world are planning a mission to Uranus.  This group of scientists has until January 2015 to submit a detailed mission plan to the ESA.

 

Figure 1: Picture of how the planet Uranus looks.

The main idea of the mission is to get more facts about the planet such as: The internal structure of the planet, find out more about the atmospheric composition and then finally the scientists can understand how the planet was formed. The thing that I ask myself, is why do we need to have a space mission to Uranus? The answer is really simple; Uranus is one of the most interesting planets in our solar system. One of those characteristics is the interesting atmosphere that Uranus has it is circled by 26 small moons, it has a few unclear rings and it has a weak magnetic field. Another interesting characteristic is that Uranus is tipped over on its side, which means that this planet rotates on an axis that point’s directly at the sun.

Figure 2: Voyager 2 on its way to the edge of our solar system, passing next to Uranus in 1986.

Though there is a really good reason why in the history of space there was only one minor mission to Uranus. First of all, the planet is around 3 billion kilometers away from the sun, which means that any spacecraft sent to Uranus will take up to 15 years to get there. The more you are away from the sun the less sunlight there is, which means that there would be no use of solar panels, so the scientists would have to use a nuclear power source in order for the spacecraft to get to Uranus. Using a nuclear power source is riskier to build and operate then using solar panels. Another problem that the scientists have is how to communicate and get data from the spacecraft that is so far away. The only way is to fit a huge dish on the spacecraft or build one on the earth. But the major problem of the mission is keeping the whole crew together that means the engineers and the operations team for the mission together for more then a decade.

The planning of the mission to Uranus has already failed once in 2010 when ESA and NASA had a proposal for a mission to Uranus known as Uranus Pathfinder. This mission plan wasn’t proposed with detailed information, which didn’t stop the scientists who came back together once again and have a deadline till January 2015 to make a new mission plan to Uranus for the ESA.  But even if the mission is approved by the ESA the mission wouldn’t be launched till 2020’s and it would reach Uranus in the mid 2030’s.

The mission to Uranus would bring us a better understanding of how the universe was formed and how the planet its self-functions. The science and technology that would be used on this mission would be even more sophisticated then the one that we used on the earlier mission that would help us improve even more. In my opinion that would be good for us because that knowledge that we got from the mission would be used in the near future.