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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: 2) by takyon on Friday September 28 2018, @06:50AM
Because NASA engineers can estimate the risk of failure or at least come up with a list of things that can go wrong. They could test spacecraft in some ways without adding years of delay prior to the launch date. They could launch them one at a time as they build them. Without the unfolding mirror design or sunshield of the JWST, a low-Earth orbit UV-VIS-NIR telescope should have fewer points of failure.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]