NASA to design probes for upcoming missions to Uranus, Neptune

 

Scientists at NASA have been asked to brainstorm new concepts for probes that could be sent to the last of the solar system’s planets yet to be orbited, Uranus and Neptune, as part of a mission that could launch in less than 15 years, according to published reports.

NASA’s request that members of its Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility in Pasadena, California begin assessing how to create and operate robotic spacecraft to send to these planets indicate that those worlds “are near the top of the space agency’s to-do list in the coming decades,” astronomy website Spaceflight Now said on Tuesday.

At a meeting of a NASA-sponsored working group devoted to outer planets research, the head of the agency’s planetary science division, Jim Green, explained that the goal was to develop low cost, scaled-back orbiters that could be launched in the late 2020s or early 2030s. Those probes would study the compositions, structures, and moons of Uranus and Neptune.

“We want to identify potential concepts across a spectrum of price points,” Green said, according to the website, adding that one of the obstacles that NASA has to overcome in order to make this mission a reality is “the huge price tag it takes… to get out to the outer solar system.”

Uranus and Neptune will have to wait their turn, however

Spaceflight Now explained that this is the first step in what will be an ongoing, multi-year effort to send a mission to the icy giant planets. The process will include cost evaluations and technical assessments, as well as federal budgeting and scientific peer review, Green said. Results from the evaluations will be presented to National Research Council scientists in the early 2020s.

A mission to Uranus and/or Neptune would most likely be “a multibillion-dollar flagship-class mission” similar to the Cassini orbiter, which travelled to Saturn, or the forthcoming probe that will be sent to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. NASA’s funding issues mean that only one such project can be in development at a time, so the proposed mission would almost certainly have to wait until the Europa mission launches in 2022.

“Obviously, it’s not going to be easy to be able, even after we get Europa under our belt, to actually execute on the next large mission,” Green said, “but we need to make progress to understand our science priorities and look at this in a way that will prepare us for the next decade, but also utilize new technologies and capabilities that have come up (since the last decadal survey).”

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(Image: Our only encounter with Uranus, taken by Voyager 2 in its 1986 flyby. Credit: NASA)