Have We Been to Uranus? | We Asked a NASA Expert

Have We Ever Been to Uranus? In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 gave us our first and only close-up look at this ice giant. What it found was a bizarre, tilted world with extreme seasons, swirling methane clouds, narrow dusty rings and icy moons that could even hide oceans beneath their crusts. Not only could Uranus hold clues about our own solar system but also the many similar-sized planets found throughout the galaxy. A NASA scientist explains why Uranus is worth a second visit. Explore more about Uranus: https://science.nasa.gov/uranus/ Producers: Scott Bednar, Pedro Cota, Jessie Wilde Editor: Daniel Salazar Credit: NASA

What is said in the film

Have we ever been to Uranus? We Asked a NASA Scientist. Have we ever been to the planet Uranus? The answer is simple, yes, but only once. The Voyager II spacecraft flew by the planet Uranus back in 1986, during a golden era when the Voyager spacecraft explored all four giant planets of our solar system.

It revealed an extreme world, a planet that had been bowled over onto its side by some extreme cataclysm early in the formation of the solar system. That means that its seasons and its magnetic field get exposed to the most dramatic seasonal variability of any place that we know of in the solar system. The atmosphere was a churning system made of methane and hydrogen and water, with methane clouds showing up as white against the bluer background of the planet itself. The densely packed ring system is host to a number of very fine, narrow and dusty rings surrounded by a collection of icy satellites. And those satellites may harbor deep, dark, hidden oceans beneath an icy crust of water ice.

Taken together, this extreme and exciting system is somewhere that we simply must go back to explore and hopefully in the next one to two decades NASA and the European Space Agency will mount an ambitious mission to go out there and explore the Uranian system. It's important not just for solar system science, but also for the growing field of exoplanet science. As planets of this particular size, the size of Uranus, about four times wider than planet Earth, seem to be commonplace throughout our galaxy. So how have we been to Uranus? Yes, but it's time that we went back.

We Asked a NASA Scientist. NASA. A NASA 360 Production.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/Have We Been to Uranus). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.