Uranus, seen by the Hubble Telescope
The trip of the only space probe sent to Uranus in 1986 by NASA lasted just 5 hours. In addition to being seen in anomalous conditions, there is now a possibility that the planet contains life.
When NASA’s Voyager 2 probe visited Uranus, researchers accepted the image transmitted: the planet was unusual because its protective magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, was devoid of plasma, recalls .
The magnetosphere retains all the gases and other materials that come off the planet and its surroundings. These can come from oceans or geological activity. Voyager 2 found none, which suggests that Uranus and its five largest moons would be sterile and inactive.
Now, this Monday, one published in Nature and led by physicist Jamie Jasinski proposes that Voyager 2’s visit occurred during a unusual increase in solar activity, which caused the contraction of the planet’s magnetosphere. This created conditions on Uranus that occurred only 4% of the time in the data the team analyzed.
“If we had arrived a week earlier, we would have had a completely different image of Uranus,” the researcher told the NYT. In other words, the only probe we have of Uranus was conditioned by highly exceptional conditions: We don’t really know the planet.
In the same article, another question is raised — Could it then be possible that this forgotten planet contains life? Experts believe so.
HAS , William Dunnfrom University College London, assured that “these results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There may be moons with the necessary conditions for life, may have oceans below the surface that may be full of fish!”.
Now, NASA has plans to launch a new mission, the Uranus Orbiter and Probeto take a closer look again in 10 years.
“Some of the instruments for the future spacecraft are being designed based on what we learned from Voyager 2when it passed through the system when it was experiencing an abnormal event”, said Jasinsk.
Therefore, he added, “we have to rethink the exact way we are going to design instruments of the new missionso that we can best capture the science we need to make discoveries.”
Wait-I know what the spacecraft, which will be sent in 10 years, returns to Earth in 2045and by that time we will have news — after all, we are facing Mars, but could the ringed planet hide other secrets?
