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, @02:14PM
The problem is power. That far away from our star, there's not much energy for life to harness. It's possible that there might be some form of life living off of the internal heat of a planet like Uranus or Neptune, but it's going to be hard to peer through that much atmosphere to find it. You can't see the extremophile bacteria on Earth from space, after all.
Power, incidentally, is why a mission to the outer planets isn't cheap. You can't just slap some solar panels on a cubesat and call it done. Everything that's gone beyond Jupiter has used a RTG, and the last I heard we're about out of the Plutonium you need to make one. We could fire up some old cold-war era reactors and breed some more, but OH NOES! NUKULAR STUFFS! In other words, like a lot of things involving space, what you've got here is a political problem, not a technical one.