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NASA Wants To Probe Deeper Into Uranus Than Ever Before
Up until now, NASA has never paid too much attention to Uranus – but now the space agency wants to take a good, long look. And one of the things it might be investigating is all that gas. A NASA group outlined four possible missions to the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.
These missions include three orbiters and a possible fly-by of Uranus. The planned probes would take off in the 2030s, New Scientist reports.
[...] One of the proposed missions includes a fly-by of Uranus, which would include a narrow-angle camera – and a probe which would drop into Uranus's atmosphere to measure gas and heavy elements. There are four proposed missions. Three orbiters and a fly-by of Uranus, which would include a narrow angle camera to draw out details, especially of the ice giant's moons. It would also drop an atmospheric probe to take a dive into Uranus's atmosphere to measure the levels of gas and heavy elements there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @02:00PM
That's a very interesting question. My knee jerk is to say yes and cite Gurren Lagann, but we only have one example of the sociology and psychology of an intelligent, technological species.
That species has been looking up at the stars ever since it gained the capability to wonder about what the lights in the sky are. They put their heroes and gods among the stars, and they speculated about whether the stars could influence their petty political processes and day-to-day lives. In spite of that long history of looking up, it remains to be seen whether they will have a significant, sustained long-term interest in even colonizing the other worlds in their own backyard, much less setting out across the great star ocean.
Would they even have similar experiences to the humans such as requiring vessels to ferry them to different parts of their world that are inaccessible by ground travel due to some atmospheric equivalent of a body of water? Building ships to cross seas is not new to the human experience, and so building ships that can cross the void of space is not a revolutionary concept to humans. It's merely a logical extension of what they had already been doing for millennia.
Perhaps then the answer is no.