Once in a lifetime: British and European space scientists urge people to join NASA's Uranus mission | space

European space scientists have been urged to join forces with NASA to ensure the success of one of the most ambitious space missions scheduled to launch this century.

Joining a robotic spaceflight to the mysterious planet Uranus will provide the opportunity to take part in a groundbreaking flagship-class mission, astrophysicists say.

The call was made by leading science journal Nature in a special editorial urging the European Space Agency (Esa) to form an international partnership with NASA. This collaboration will ensure that the Uranus mission, which involves placing a robotic spacecraft into orbit around the planet and dropping the probe into its thick, icy atmosphere, is completed on time and on budget.

The mission will take 10 years to develop and 12 to 15 years to reach Uranus after launch.

Editorial authors Olivier Mousis, professor of astrophysics at the University of Aix-Marseille, and Robin Canup, an American astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said: The flagship mission will also undercut the large community of scientists, engineers and technicians involved in space exploration across Europe, who have a keen interest in the search for planets and extraterrestrial life.

The establishment of a European-American partnership for a Uranus mission is not unprecedented. In 2004, the Nasas Cassini robotic spacecraft launched an Esa-built probe named Huygens after entering orbit around Saturn. The probe parachuted onto the planet's moon Titan, revealing a world with a crisp, brittle surface and lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. This joint mission is considered a classic example of the benefits of international spaceflight cooperation.

In their editorial, Mousis and Canup argue that if Esa fails to seize the opportunity to participate in the Uranus mission, a consortium of individual European countries should be formed to construct a probe that would be launched from a major U.S.-built spacecraft. With a good track record in establishing co-operative ventures in space, the UK will be well placed to play a key role in such ventures.

Scientists claim that Uranus has characteristics that give it special scientific significance. While the rest of the planets in our solar system spin like a top, Uranus lies on its side. And although it is not the furthest planet from the sun, it is the coldest planet in the solar system.

Uranus also experiences incredibly long seasons. Each pole experiences decades of uninterrupted sunlight, followed by decades of complete darkness. However, only one space probe has ever visited Uranus. In 1986, Voyager 2 swept past Uranus, revealing a featureless pale blue world with a moon. There have been no ground visits since.

But this lack of interest is about to change. Two years ago, the US National Academy of Sciences issued a report calling on NASA to launch a probe to Uranus as a high-priority flagship mission. The Academy's views have enormous influence, putting pressure on NASA to launch a spacecraft to Uranus in the near future.

There are two main reasons behind the drive to visit Uranus. The first is regional. The solar system consists of three categories of planets. the inner rocky worlds of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars; The two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn are farther from the Sun. And at the edge of the solar system are Uranus and Neptune. They are known as ice giants because they are four times larger in diameter than Earth and have large amounts of methane, water and other ice-forming molecules in their atmosphere.

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This last feature has always been interesting, but not interesting enough to justify a dedicated probe until astronomers, armed with powerful new telescopes and space probes, began studying planets orbiting other stars.

Surprisingly, they discovered that planets the size of Uranus and Neptune appear to exist throughout our galaxy. Nature loves creating planets this size, Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the journal Science.

The second core reason and question of the mission is why. Many theories have been put forward, but no definitive answer is provided until Uranus is studied in detail. In addition to finding evidence that could explain why ice giants are common around other stars, the mission aims to explain why the planet is so cold and why its axis of rotation is tilted sideways. Mousis and Canup argue: The scientific drivers for the Uranus mission are compelling.

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