voyager 2 arrives at uranus

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Images voyager took of uranus.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

For a fact sheet on the Uranus science summary, click here .

False-color view of Uranus.

Uranus’s outermost ring., uranus’s moon miranda., true-color (left) and false-color views of uranus. january 17, 1986. range 5.7 million miles..

False-color composite of Uranus shows discrete cloud. January 14, 1986. Range, 8.0 million miles.

Time-lapse images show cloud movements in Uranus’s atmosphere over 4.6-hour interval.

Farewell shot of crescent Uranus as Voyager 2 departs. January 25, 1986. Range 600,000 miles.

Three of the moons discovered by Voyager 2: 1986U1, 1986U3, and 1986U4. January 18, 1986. Range 4.8 million miles.

Two "shepherd" moons, 1986U7 and 1986U8, with epsilon ring. January 21, 1986. Range, 2.5 million miles.

False-color composite of Uranus’s rings (from top): epsilon, delta, gamma, eta, beta, alpha, 4, 5 and 6. January 21 1986. Range, 2.6 million miles.

Rings of Uranus, including newly discovered 10th ring designated 1986U1R (barely visible below outermost epsilon ring). January 23, 1986. Range, 690,000 miles.

Backlit view shows continuous distribution of fine particles throughout ring system. January 24, 1986. Range, 147,000 miles.

Heavy crate ring seen in most detailed view of Umbriel. January 24, 1986. Range, 346,000 miles.

Best image of Oberon shows cratering and large peak on moon’s lower limb. January 24, 1986. Range 410,000 miles.

Mosaic of Ariel, most detailed view from Voyager 2 shows numerous faults and valleys. January 24, 1986. Range, 80,000 miles.

Highest-resolution picture of Titania displays prominent fault valleys nearly 1,000 miles long. January 24, 1986. Range, 229,000 miles.

Color composite shows evidence of impact scars and past geologic activity on Titania. January 24, 1986. Range, 300,000 miles.

Computer mosaic of Miranda images shows varied geologic regions at high resolution. January 24, 1986.

Unusual "Chevron" figure seen on approach to Miranda. January 24, 1986. Range, 26,000 miles.

Varied terrain on Miranda indicates complex geologic history. January 24, 1986. Range, 21,000 miles.

Voyager 2 image of Miranda taken shortly before closest approach. January 24, 1986. Range 19,000 miles.

Miranda displays rugged, high-elevation terrain (right), lower, grooved terrain and large crater (lower left) 15 miles across. January 24, 1986. Range, 22,000 miles.

Voyager 2: First Spacecraft at Uranus

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News | January 29, 2001

Fifteenth anniversary of voyager 2 flyby of uranus in 1986.

Posted by Larry Klaes from the History of Astronomy Discussion Group

The first unmanned space probe flyby in history of the planet Uranus by Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986 should have been an exciting one in the history of planetary exploration:

• Uranus was the first planet discovered by humans not thousands of years before written history and civilization, but in relatively moderns times - on March 13, 1781 by German musician turned English astronomer William Herschel, to be exact. I know others may have viewed Uranus telescopically before Herschel, be he was the first one to figure out that it was a planet and not a comet or star. Theoretically one could see Uranus with unaided vision from Earth, but it would have been too dim for our ancestors to really notice it, even in their non-light polluted night skies (at least none ever said they did that made it to our time).
• Uranus was later found to be a world tipped on its side compared to the rest of the known planets in the Sol system. Only later did astronomers learn that Pluto was tipped even moreso on its side and Venus was knocked all the way around from our perspective. With an axial tilt of almost 98 degrees (compare this to Earth's 23.5 degree tilt), Uranus' poles spend roughly half their time in the planet's 84-year solar orbit either in constant darkness or light.
• The discovery of a ring system around Uranus in 1977 gave the first real evidence that, rather than being unique to Saturn, ring systems around Jovian worlds are probably common. Indeed, the next few years - thanks to the Voyager probes - would show that these rings were indeed standard features for all of the gas giant planets of our Sol system.
• The five known moons of Uranus were virtually unknown little worlds, but after the Voyager probes' experiences with the exciting satellites of Jupiter and Saturn from 1979 through 1981, it was assumed they too would hold exciting new surprises for us.
• Voyager 2 was not meant to visit Uranus after Saturn, having already come from a scaled-down version of the Grand Tour of the outer planets. However, since Voyager 1 did make it to Saturn and perform a close examination of its largest moon Titan, Voyager 2 was given the go-ahead to Uranus and eventually Neptune in 1989 (it should be noted that Voyager 2 also survived being shut off in 1981 to allegedly save some bucks by the Reagan Administration, I kid you not). So with this rare bonus in hand, scientists were most eager to get their first close-up views of this bizarre alien world way out in the outer Sol system. But fate likes to play games with human expectations, and the Universe itself certainly does not cater to our wants and desires. The Voyager 2 mission to Uranus did go off as planned, but its two main problems had nothing to do with the space probe itself:
• Uranus itself did not turn out to be as "exciting" as the other two previously explored Jovian worlds, Jupiter and Saturn. The clouds were a bland and featureless shade of blue. The rings were dark and thin. The moons did not look much different from the other icy satellites of Jupiter and especially Saturn. Miranda was the only real exception, looking like a world that had been literally torn apart and smashed back together, complete with 20-kilometer high sheer ice cliffs.

One would think that exploring any new world for the first time in what was (and still is) the early days of our testing the waters of deep space would be exciting enough, but somehow the public and press had gotten spoiled by the amazing wonders at Jupiter and Saturn (not to mention many space-based science fiction flicks), and Uranus was just not cutting the bill, even if it was tipped on its side.

• The other deflecting event took place just four days after Voyager 2's closest flyby: The Space Shuttle Challenger 51-L mission ended tragically before it could even get into Earth orbit, where a leak in a solid rocket booster acted like a torch on the external fuel tank and caused it to explode, turning the shuttle into scrap metal and killing the seven astronauts on board - one of whom was going to be the first teacher in space.

This flight alone killed more astronauts than all previous manned space tragedies combined: The lone cosmonaut of Soyuz 1 in 1967 and the three cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 who had just returned from a thirty-day stay on the Soviet Salyut 1 space station in June of 1971 (the three astronauts of the Apollo 1 crew were killed in a fire during a ground test in 1967).

Needless to say, the press attention almost immediately evaporated from the lone space robot and the dull world it had been monitoring over two billion kilometers away to Cape Canaveral and NASA and did not come back.

Despite all this negativity from the general human perspective towards the Voyager 2 Uranus encounter, many new and important items were learned about this new world. Among them was the discovery of ten new moons circling the planet, a powerful magnetic field tipped sixty degrees to the planet's axis, and strong evidence that the outer Sol system went through a very violent period of collisions with other celestial bodies in the early days of our system's creation, judging by what happened to Uranus' moons and the planet itself, having been knocked completely on its side.

While Voyager 2 certainly did give us more information on Uranus than all previous Earth-based studies combined, no quick flyby can do what an orbiting probe can, as Galileo has certainly shown with Jupiter since 1995 and Cassini will with Saturn starting in 2004.

Though I would certainly like to be proven wrong here, there are no serious plans to orbit or even visit Uranus again any time soon.

For more on the Voyager 2 mission to Uranus, read here:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/calendar/vgr_ura.html

For more on the Voyager probes, go here and scroll down a bit for the Uranus encounter information:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/voyager.html

Web sites on Uranus:

http://www.seds.org/billa/tnp/uranus.html

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/uranuspage.html

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Voyager 1 & 2 Voyager 1 & 2

• Launch Date: 5 September 1977
• Mission: Explore Jupiter, Saturn and their satellites
• Arrived at Jupiter: March 1979
• Arrived at Saturn: November 1980

Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Voyager 1 was the first of twin spacecrafts launched in 1977 to reach Jupiter. Voyager 1 set out to collect information on the atmospheres, interiors, satellites and magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 1 took roughly 32,000 pictures of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons and rings. When its mission was complete, Voyager 1 remained rather quiet until its cameras were turned back on in early 1990 to take pictures of our solar system. Voyager 1 took some 60 pictures of the Sun and 6 of the planets, the first shots ever taken from "outside" our Solar System. The 60 frames were combined to make the mosaic seen below. The six individual shots on the right were taken when Voyager 1 was more than 4 billion miles from Earth. Earth appears framed in brightness due to the amount of light scattered while taking the picture with Earth so close to the Sun.

FIND OUT MORE AT THE VOYAGER HOME PAGE Capturing shots of the Sun, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune was the last of Voyager's tasks and the cameras were once again turned off. Still speeding away from us, Voyager 1 is approaching the outer edge of our Solar System and is currently the most distant man-made object in space.

• Launch Date: 20 August 1977
• Mission: Explore all of the outer planets and their satellites
• Arrived at Jupiter: July 1979
• Arrived at Saturn: August 1981
• Arrived at Uranus: January 1986
• Arrived at Neptune: August 1989

Even though it arrived at Jupiter 4 months later, Voyager 2 actually left Earth before Voyager 1. Voyager 2's objectives were the same as Voyager 1, and they both ended up collecting about the same number of photographs of Jupiter and Saturn. Despite initial complications with Voyager 2, permission was granted to extend its mission to Uranus, Neptune and beyond.

Successful flybys of Uranus starting in January 1986 allowed for roughly 8,000 images of the planet and its satellites. A few years later, in August 1989, Voyager 2 arrived at Neptune and collected around 10,000 images.

This image of Neptune, taken by Voyager 2, shows the Great Dark Spot. Though comparable in size to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, it is actually an atmospheric hole kind of like the one in the Earth's ozone layer. The picture below is a close up of the Great Dark Spot, also taken by Voyager 2.

Results of the Voyager missions

• Discovery of 22 new satellites: 3 at Jupiter, 3 at Saturn, 10 at Uranus, 6 at Neptune
• Discovery of Jupiter's rings, and additional information about the rings of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
• Discovery of Uranian and Neptunian magnetospheres
• Discovery of active volcanism on Io, and active geyser-like structures on Triton
• Discovery of auroral zones on Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune

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NASA’s Voyager 2 continues its journey into interstellar space after 45 years

Voyager 2 was launched over 45 years ago and has continued to function a long time after completing its initial mission objectives. currently, it is so far away from earth that radio signals from the spacecraft take 18 hours to reach us..

Over 45 years ago, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft left Earth to embark on a journey to the outer planets and beyond. The journey continues to this day. Voyager 2, the first of two spacecraft part of the mission, lifted off on August 20, 1977, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment to use the gravity of one planet to propel itself to another. Even though the Voyager mission only targeted Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune as well. Voyager 1 was launched on September 5 of the same year.

The pair of spacecraft carry sophisticated instruments for the in-depth exploration of outer planets. They both continue to return data as they are heading out of the solar system and into interstellar space.

Voyager mission: Origin

The Voyager mission has its origins in the 1960s when mission designers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory observed that the next alignment of outer planets, a rare event that occurs only once every 175 years, would happen in the late 1970s. At the time, technology was advanced enough to take advantage of this alignment to fly a spacecraft by Jupiter and use its gravity to visit Saturn as well, to then repeat the process to visit Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

This was an ideal scenario since launching several missions to each planet individually would have been an expensive affair that also took much more time. The space agency developed a plan to send two pairs of “Thermoelectric Outer Planet Spacecraft” on these Grand Tours. But that plan was cancelled in 1971 as it proved too costly.

NASA Administrator Jame C Fletcher announced on March 7, 1977, the renaming of two Mariner spacecraft to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. At the time, scientists held out hope that one of them could eventually visit Uranus and Neptune, fulfilling the original objectives of the cancelled Grand Tour mission.

Voyager mission launch

Voyager 2 was the first to leave the planet and was launched on a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket from Launch Complex 21 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (then the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station) in Florida. Even though Voyager 1 was launched two weeks later, it travelled on a faster trajectory and arrived at Jupiter four months earlier than Voyager 2.

Between December 10, 1977, and October 21, 1978, Voyager 2 successfully crossed the asteroid belt. However, its primary radio failed in April 1978 and it has been operating on its backup receiver ever since then.

Voyager 2: Observing Jupiter and Saturn

Between April 24 and August 5, 1979, Voyager 2 conducted observations of Jupiter, with its closest approach of around 563,000 kilometres above the gas giant’s cloud tops on July 9. Voyager 2 returned 17,000 images of Jupiter and its satellites and also helped confirm Voyager 1’s discovery of a thin ring encircling the planet. The spacecraft also returned information about the planet’s atmospheric and magnetic field. It then used Jupiter’s gravity to bend its trajectory and accelerate towards Saturn.

On June 5, 1981, Voyager 2 began its long-range observations of Saturn and passed within 41,000 kilometres of the planet’s cloud tops on August 26 before concluding its observations on September 4. It captured 16,000 photographs of Saturn, its rings and many of its satellites. Apart from discovering many new satellites, Voyager 2’s instruments also returned data about the ringed planet’s atmosphere. The planet’s gravity then sent the spacecraft on its journey to Uranus.

Going beyond: Uranus and Neptune

Between November 4, 1985, and February 25, 1986, Voyager 2 conducted close-up observations of Uranus, making its closest approach of around 81,500 kilometres above the planet’s cloud tops on January 25, 1986. The spacecraft returned over 7,000 photos of the planet, its ring and moons. It also discovered two new rings and 11 new moons. Voyager 2’s instruments also returned data concerning the planet’s atmosphere and its unusual magnetic field.

The spacecraft then used Uranus’ gravity to launch itself towards its last planetary stop, Neptune. Between June 5 and October 2, 1989, it conducted close-up observations of the planet, flying as close as around 5,400 kilometres above the north pole of the eighth planet on August 25. On this trajectory, it also observed Neptune’s largest moon Triton, the last solid object it explored.

During its observation of Uranus, Voyager 2 returned more than 9,000 images of the planet, its atmosphere, dark rings, and moons. It also discovered six new moons. The spacecraft helped discover that Neptune also had an unusual magnetic field like Uranus.; tilted 47 degrees from the planet’s axis and significantly offset from its centre.

Voyager 2’s interstellar journey

After its observation of Neptune, the spacecraft began its interstellar mission that continues to this day. Over the years, many of Voyager 2’s instruments had to be turned off to conserve power, starting with the imaging system in 1998. Currently, the spacecraft is more than 19 billion kilometres away from Earth. In fact, it is so far away that it takes 18 hours for radio signals from the spacecraft to reach here. With it being so far away from the Sun, it is a remarkable scientific achievement that it can continue to return data.

Over 45 years ago, NASA engineers had prepared for the possibility that an alien intelligence finds the space crafts. Voyager 2, just like Voyager 1, carries a gold-plated record that contains information about Earth including recordings of sounds, music, and greetings in 55 languages. Engineers also included instructions on how to play the record.

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Voyager 2 Trajectory through the Solar System

• Released Thursday, August 31, 2017
• Visualizations by:
• Tom Bridgman

This visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 2 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on August 20, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Like Voyager 1, Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, but the Voyager 2 mission was extended to fly by Uranus and Neptune before being directed out of the solar system. To fit the 40 year history of the mission into a short visualization, the pacing of time accelerates through most of the movie, starting at about 5 days per second at the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are past. The termination shock and heliopause are the 'boundaries' created when the plasma between the stars interacts with the plasma flowing outward from the Sun. They are represented with simple grid models and oriented so their 'nose' is pointed in the direction (Right Ascension = 17h 24m, declination = 17 degrees south) represented by more recent measurements from other missions.

Visualization centered on the Voyager 2 trajectory through the solar system.

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Check out Voyager at NASA/JPL for more information.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.00000_print.jpg (1024x576) [104.9 KB]

Opening view of Earth orbit looking outward to the rest of the solar system.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.00520_print.jpg (1024x576) [116.1 KB]

Voyager 2 (and 1) cross the orbit of Mars, slightly above the ecliptic plane to avoid the asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.01530_print.jpg (1024x576) [110.3 KB]

The camera moves out ahead of the Voyagers for a view back at the inner solar system.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02070_print.jpg (1024x576) [102.3 KB]

Voyager 2 just after the Jupiter flyby on July 9, 1979.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02500_print.jpg (1024x576) [104.7 KB]

Voyager 2 just after the Saturn flyby on August 26, 1981.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02800_print.jpg (1024x576) [110.8 KB]

Voyager 2 just before the Uranus flyby on January 24, 1986.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02925_print.jpg (1024x576) [100.8 KB]

Voyager 2 just after the Neptune flyby on August 25, 1989.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02970_print.jpg (1024x576) [102.6 KB]

Using Neptune for a gravity-assist, Voyager 2 is directed below the plane of the solar system and continues outward.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.03470_print.jpg (1024x576) [87.8 KB]

Voyager 2 crosses the termination shock around May of 2006.

• Voyager.ChaseV2.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.03840_print.jpg (1024x576) [99.4 KB]

Voyager 2 crosses the heliopause.

A slightly sped-up version of the Voyager 2 visualization above, reducing the time for the Voyagers to cross the asteroid belt.

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• Voyager2SpedUp.webm (1920x1080) [12.2 MB]
• Voyager2_Sped_Up-HD1080p.mov (1920x1080) [185.4 MB]
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• Voyager_2_Sped_Up_4k_H264.mov (3840x2160) [632.1 MB]
• Voyager_2_Sped_Up_4k_ProRes.mov (3840x2160) [7.2 GB]
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• Planets & Moons
• Planetary Science
• Solar System

Please give credit for this item to: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

• Tom Bridgman  (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
• Genna Duberstein  (USRA)
• Scott Wiessinger  (USRA)
• Kathalina Tran  (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)

Project support

• Laurence Schuler  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
• Ian Jones  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

Release date

This page was originally published on Thursday, August 31, 2017. This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:05 AM EST.

• Voyager @ 40
• Voyager Retrospective

Datasets used in this visualization

Planetary ephemerides SPICE kernel

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

Hubble’s Brand New Image of Jupiter

This new Hubble Space Telescope view of Jupiter, taken on June 27, 2019, reveals the giant planet's trademark Great Red Spot, and a more intense color palette in the clouds swirling in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere than seen in previous years. The colors, and their changes, provide important clues to ongoing processes in planetary atmospheres. For more information, visit https://nasa.gov/hubble. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Paul Morris/Tracy VogelMusic credits: "Solaris" by Axel Tenner [GEMA], Michael Schluecker [GEMA] and Raphael Schalz [GEMA]; Killer Tracks Production Music ||

Where is the Edge of the Solar System?

Complete transcript available.Music credit: Dream Girl 3 by Yuri Sazonoff || EdgeofSolarSystem_ThumbnailOption2_print.jpg (1024x576) [252.4 KB] || EdgeofSolarSystem_ThumbnailOption2.png (3840x2160) [14.7 MB] || EdgeofSolarSystem_ThumbnailOption2_thm.png (80x40) [7.0 KB] || EdgeofSolarSystem_ThumbnailOption2_searchweb.png (320x180) [115.1 KB] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_appletv.m4v (1280x720) [28.8 MB] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_appletv_subtitles.m4v (1280x720) [28.8 MB] || YOUTUBE_1080_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_youtube_1080.webm (1920x1080) [7.2 MB] || TWITTER_720_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_twitter_720.mp4 (1280x720) [12.3 MB] || YOUTUBE_1080_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_youtube_1080.mp4 (1920x1080) [95.1 MB] || YOUTUBE_720_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_youtube_720.mp4 (1280x720) [96.0 MB] || FACEBOOK_720_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_facebook_720.mp4 (1280x720) [70.5 MB] || PRORES_B-ROLL_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_prores.mov (1280x720) [403.5 MB] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_youtube_hq.mov (3840x2160) [1.8 GB] || YOUTUBE_4K_12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_youtube_4k.mp4 (3840x2160) [246.9 MB] || 12639_Edge_of_the_Solar_System.en_US.srt [810 bytes] || 12639_Edge_of_the_Solar_System.en_US.vtt [823 bytes] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_2997fps_v02.mov (3840x2160) [3.7 GB] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02.mov (3840x2160) [3.0 GB] || 12639_EdgeofSolarSystem_Final_24fps_v02_VX-718267_lowres.mp4 (480x272) [9.5 MB] ||

Voyager 1 Trajectory through the Solar System

This visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 1 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on September 5, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn before being directed out of the solar system.To fit the 40 year history of the mission into a short visualization, the pacing of time accelerates through most of the movie, starting at about 5 days per second at the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are past.The termination shock and heliopause are the 'boundaries' created when the plasma between the stars interacts with the plasma flowing outward from the Sun. They are represented with simple grid models and oriented so their 'nose' is pointed in the direction (Right Ascension = 17h 24m, declination = 17 degrees south) represented by more recent measurements from other missions. ||

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The Voyager spacecraft will probably last a billion years, says a scientist on the mission for nearly 5 decades

• Alan Cummings has worked on the Voyager mission for over 50 years.
• Since their launch, the two Voyager spacecraft have made breakthrough discoveries that keep Cummings engaged.
• Cummings thinks they will continue traveling for a billion years.

The twin Voyager spacecraft launched almost five decades ago, and there's no reason they shouldn't keep going for a billion years, one of its scientists, Alan Cummings told Business Insider.

Cummings started working on the Voyager mission when he was a graduate student at Caltech in 1973, about four years before the two spacecraft launched.

Now a senior research scientist at Caltech, Cummings has seen the program dwindle from over 300 people to fewer than a dozen.

Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled over 10 billion miles into space, further than any human-made object. Cummings said being a part of this historic mission for so many decades has been the backbone of his career.

"The Hubble Telescope is a great mission," he said. " JWST is a great mission, but I think Voyager's in that kind of category."

Voyagers' endurance

The Voyager mission has been gathering groundbreaking data and photos since the beginning.

The first time Cummings saw Jupiter's moon Io in 1979, for example, he thought it was a joke. "It looked like a poorly made pizza," he said.

Its colorful, volcano-covered surface looked so different from Earth's gray, pockmarked moon . "This can't be real," he said, "and it was real."

The Voyagers offered us a new perspective on our outer solar system, unlike anything we could have imagined.

They discovered Saturn wasn't the only planet with rings — Jupiter has them too. They revealed new moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

In total, the two spacecraft snapped 67,000 images of our solar system, the final of which was the "pale blue dot" photo made famous by Carl Sagan who said:

"To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

"It rewrote the textbooks," Cummings said of the mission.

Both Voyagers were initially planned as five-year missions, but Cummings said, from the beginning, he expected the spacecraft to last at least 30 to 40 years.

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"A remarkable engineering team has kept this thing going," Cummings said.

Now, as the two spacecraft approach their 50th anniversaries, they're running low on fuel.

Engineers have had to shut down different instruments to keep them going and the data coming in.

Cummings said once the Voyagers lose power and communication, they'll continue traveling. "I think it's going to go for a billion years," he said. "There's nothing to stop it."

Joining Voyager

If it weren't for an unfortunate accident, Cummings may never have joined the Voyager mission.

Before Voyager, Cummings was part of an experiment to measure cosmic rays using a balloon.

For several summers, he had released the balloon from northern Manitoba, Canada.

But during its final flight, the balloon didn't descend as expected and ended up over Russia, instead.

By the time Cummings got to Russia, the instrument was destroyed.

"It was very fortunate for me," he said, because he was able to then join the Voyager mission.

He put his cosmic ray experience to use, working on telescopes for the mission's experiments.

"I have my little initials scratched on one of those" telescopes he said, "so I guess I'm going to be immortal."

Interstellar space

Cummings has worked on other projects over the decades, but Voyagers' continual transmission of new data has kept him excited and involved.

"There's always some new phenomenon that you see," he said.

In fact, Voyager's data has become increasingly more interesting to Cummings in recent years because the two spacecraft are now in interstellar space , the region of space beyond our sun's influence.

After passing by the four giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, many of the instruments were still in working order. So, the spacecraft transitioned to an interstellar mission.

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter interstellar space and Voyager 2 followed six years later.

"That is really what I was most interested in anyway," Cummings said, since cosmic rays are his field of expertise and in interstellar space, those rays aren't disrupted by the sun, Earth, and other obstructions in our solar system.

Voyager is "making its most interesting measurements in some ways right now," he said.

Currently, Voyager 1 is having issues with one of its onboard computers that could compromise the mission.

Cummings hopes the Voyagers can hang on a little longer, especially since interstellar space is a long way off for any other spacecraft.

Watch: NASA released this 5-year time-lapse of Mars from its Curiosity rover — and the footage looks amazing

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March 14, 2024

10 min read

Voyager 1’s Immortal Interstellar Requiem

NASA is reaching across more than 15 billion miles to rescue its malfunctioning Voyager 1 probe—but this hallowed interstellar mission can’t live forever

By Nadia Drake

An artist's concept of NASA's Voyager 1, the space agency's venerable and farthest-flung interplanetary probe.

Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library

In the fall of last year, one of NASA’s most venerable spacecraft started beaming home nonsense. Its usual string of 1’s and 0’s—binary code that collectively told of its journey into the unknown—became suddenly unintelligible.

Some 15 billion miles from Earth, beyond the protective bubble blown by the sun and in interstellar space, Voyager 1 was in trouble.

“We’d gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone,” says Linda Spilker , Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

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Spilker joined JPL in 1977, the same year that NASA launched Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 , on what, in a way, was an endless odyssey: from Earth, to the outer solar system and ultimately to interstellar infinity . Today there are several billion people on Earth who have never taken a breath without the Voyagers in our sky, people who, like me, have only ever existed in a cosmos shared with these talkative twin spacecraft. But like people, spacecraft get old. They break down .

And all good things—and even great ones—must come to an end. After days, and weeks and then months of nothing but indecipherable binary babbling, Voyager 1’s earthbound stewards had to reckon with the idea that maybe, after more than 46 years, its time had at last run out.

The Voyager 1 team at JPL had traced the problem to the spacecraft’s Flight Data System, an onboard computer that parses and parcels engineering and science measurements for subsequent radio transmittal to Earth. One possibility was that a high-energy cosmic particle had struck Voyager 1 and caused a bit flip within the system’s memory — something that has happened more frequently as the craft navigates the hostile wilds of interstellar space. Normally, the team would simply ask the spacecraft for a memory readout, allowing its members to find and reset the errant bit.

“We’ve recovered from bit flips before. The problem this time is we don’t know where the bit flip is because we can’t see what the memory is,” says Suzanne Dodd , Voyager project manager at JPL, who, like Spilker, began her long career with work on the probes. “It’s the most serious issue we’ve had since I’ve been the project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft.”

Yesterday, the team announced a significant step in breaking through to Voyager 1. After months of stress and unsuccessful answers they have managed to decode at least a portion of the spacecraft’s gobbledygook, allowing them to (maybe) find a way to see what it has been trying to say.

“It’s an excellent development on Voyager,” says Joe Westlake , director of NASA’s heliophysics division, which oversees the mission.

In the time it will take you to read this story, Voyager 1 will have traversed approximately 10,000 miles of mostly empty space ; in the weeks it took me to report it, the probe traveled some 26 million miles. And since its communication first became garbled last November, the spacecraft has sailed another 10 light-minutes away from home. Voyager 1 and its twin are slipping away from us as surely as the passage of time itself. Sooner or later, these hallowed space-age icons will fall silent, becoming no more than distant memories.

And even among the space community, which of course loves all of its robotic explorers equally, the Voyagers are special. “They are incredibly important and much beloved spacecraft,” says Nicola Fox , NASA’s associate administrator for science. “Voyager 1 is a national treasure, along with Voyager 2 .”

As envisioned, the Voyager mission would exploit a once-in-175-year alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to slingshot through the solar system’s sparsely charted hinterlands. Legend has it that NASA’s administrator sold the project to President Richard Nixon by noting that the last time the planets were so favorably arranged, Thomas Jefferson was living in the White House. Outfitted with nuclear power sources, the Voyagers were built to last—in utter defiance of the adage that what must go up, must come down. Neither was ever intended to make planetfall again; instead they were bound for the stars. And now, nearly a half-century later, the pair have become the longest-lived and farthest-flung probes ever dispatched by humankind. (Voyager 1 is the front-runner, with its sibling trailing close behind.)

Spilker was straight out of college when she started working on the Voyagers, eager to see the outer solar system through their robotic eyes as they surfed the rare celestial alignment. “I had a telescope in third grade that I used to look at Jupiter and Saturn,” she says. “I wanted to get up really close and get a look at what these planets look like.”

Between 1979 and 1981, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 zipped by the gas giants , returning stunning images of banded Jupiter and buttery Saturn and their bewildering collection of moons. Voyager 2 went on to scrutinize the ice giants: Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. These were the first and only times anyone had seen each of these bluish ringed worlds up close.

“They were small little pinpoints of light, and now you’re flying close,” Spilker says. “And you see the cliffs of Miranda”—a bizarre Uranian moon—“and Triton, with active geysers going off.” (Nobody had expected to see an active icy world in orbit around Neptune, and even now Voyager’s 35-year-old image is still the best we have of that strange little moon.)

When the Voyagers left the realm of the known planets, each followed a different path into darkness: Voyager 1 arced up and out of the plane of the solar system, and Voyager 2 looped downward. Spilker also followed her own path: she went to graduate school and earned her doctorate in planetary science using Voyager data—not knowing that several decades later, after leading NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, she’d again be part of the mission that started it all.

“The chance came to go back to Voyager,” she says. “And I said, ‘Of course. I’d love to go back.’”

In the interim, as the Voyagers sailed farther from their Earthly harbor, teams shut down many of the onboard instruments, including the cameras. But the pair kept studying the space that they alone were visiting. Their main job was now to characterize the heliosphere—the solar-system-encompassing, cosmic-ray-blocking bubble formed by our sun’s wind and magnetic field. They would document the alien mix of particles and fields that pervade near nothingness. And maybe, if they got lucky, the twins would each escape the protective solar caul entirely to be reborn as true interstellar wanderers.

In 2012 Voyager 1 transcended this boundary , known as the heliopause, where the sun’s influence wanes. Before that scientists could only guess at what lay beyond this barrier and could only model how it shielded Earth from the harshness of the void. Now Voyager 1 could tell us directly about the stuff between the stars. Voyager 2 followed in 2018 , and Fox—then the new chief of NASA’s heliophysics division—was in the midst of the action.

“You’re looking at the cosmic rays going up and the solar wind going down, and it was one of those ‘oh, my god, this is so exciting’ moments,” Fox recalls. “I think of the Voyagers as one mission,” she says. “We’re putting all the data together, but they’re the ones that are out there. They’re the brave spacecraft that have left the protective bubble of the heliosphere and are out exploring interstellar space. It’s hard not to be excited by them.”

This wasn’t the first time Voyager 1 had started speaking an unintelligible language. In 2022, when the probe suffered an earlier bout of garbled telemetry, JPL engineer Bob Rasmussen was shaken out of retirement. The lab wanted to know if Rasmussen, who’d joined the spacecraft’s systems engineering team in 1975, was willing to have a think about the situation.

“I’d been happily retired for a bit more than a year at that point, with plenty else to keep me busy,” Rasmussen says. “But I like solving puzzles, and this was a tough one that I just couldn’t pass up. Cracking it took a few months, but the puzzle stream hasn’t slowed since then.”

Afterward, he stayed on-call. So last November, when Voyager 1 again started transmitting nonsense, Rasmussen was ready for more problem-solving. He was joined by a hand-picked team of specialists, and together they dove into the details for getting the ailing spacecraft back in action.

The problems were at least three layers deep. First, it takes a long time to communicate with Voyager 1. Traveling at the speed of light, the radio signals used to command the spacecraft take 22.5 hours to travel 15 billion miles—and 22.5 hours to come back. Second, the Voyagers are not exactly modern technology.

“Most things don’t last 46 years. Your clock radio and toaster aren’t going to last 46 years,” says Dodd, who started on the Voyager project straight out of school, then worked on other missions and is now back on this one.

Plus, many of the people who built and developed the spacecraft in the 1970s aren’t around to explain the rationale behind the designs.

And third, unluckily enough, whatever had mangled the spacecraft had managed to take out Voyager 1’s ability to send meaningful communications. The team was in the dark, trying to find the invisible source of an error. (Imagine trying to revive a stalled desktop computer with a frozen screen: you can’t see your cursor, and your clicks risk causing more problems—except in this case each input carries a multiday lag and could damage a precious, misbehaving artifact that is more than 15 billion miles away.) Perhaps the most vexing part was the team’s knowledge that Voyager 1 was otherwise intact and functioning as it should be.

“It’s still doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Westlake says. “It just can’t quite figure out how to send the correct message home.”

Rasmussen and his colleagues set out to understand the spacecraft in as much detail as possible. That meant poring over the original design schematics, now yellowed and pinned to various walls—an effort that resembled “a bit of an archaeology dig,” Dodd says—and studying how past teams had addressed anomalies. That was tricky, Dodd says, because even though the team members could figure out how engineers solved a problem, they couldn’t necessarily discern the rationale behind various solutions. They’d send commands to Voyager 1 about once a week—usually on Fridays—and by Sunday, they’d hear back from the spacecraft.

“There’s suspense after each cautious move, hope with each piece that falls into place, disappointment if our hunches are wrong,” Rasmussen says.

Progress was slow. And as time crept on, the team grew more concerned. But no one was giving up, at any level of leadership.

“I will rely on the Voyager team to say, ‘Hey, Nicky, we’ve done everything , ’” Fox says. “We wouldn’t make any decisions until we knew that every single thing had been tried and tried again because we really do want to get Voyager 1 back talking to us.”

And then, in early March, something changed. In response to a command, instead of beaming back absolute gibberish, the spacecraft sent a string of numbers that looked more familiar. It proved to be a Rosetta stone moment. Soon an unnamed engineer at NASA’s Deep Space Network—the globe-girdling array of radio dishes that relays information from Earth to spacecraft—had learned how to speak Voyager 1’s jumbled language.

After translating that vaguely familiar portion of the spacecraft’s transmission, the team could see that it contained a readout of the flight data system’s memory. Now they face new questions: Can they find and correct the source of the mutated code? Can they learn whether the spacecraft is sending useful science data? Can they restore Voyager 1’s lexicon to its original state—or will they need to continue speaking in the probe’s new postheliopause patois? “The hope is that we’ll get good science data back,” Westlake says. “Thinking about something that’s been a constant throughout my entire career going away is really tough to think about.”

But either by glitch or time’s slow decay of radioactive power sources, the Voyagers will, of course, eventually fade away. Each year they lose four watts of power, and they grow ever colder. “Whether it’s this particular anomaly that gets us or one downstream, or the spacecraft gets old enough and cold enough —one day you’ll go to look for it and it has just stopped working,” Spilker says.

Like silent ambassadors or wordless emissaries, the Voyagers will keep sailing outward, still carrying us with them into the stars—“sort of like a message a bottle,” Spilker says.

Besides their science payloads, a fraction of each spacecraft’s mass was devoted to casting a cosmic message into the interstellar ocean from a lonely island called Earth. Mounted to each probe is a golden record etched with grooves encoding a selection of sights and sounds from our small corner of space and time. An accompanying stylus is positioned to play the record from the beginning, alongside a pictographic and arithmetic instruction manual.

The records are gold because gold is stable for eons, and they’re records because that was the best way to store a lot of information in the 1970s. Should they ever be recovered and decoded, the message will tell the stories of we humans—at least as envisioned (and in some cases performed) by a small group of folks that included my parents ( the late astrophysicist Frank Drake and his surviving spouse Amahl Shakhashiri Drake), astronomer Carl Sagan, documentary producer Ann Druyan and science writer Timothy Ferris. Those stories are imperfect. They’re filled with lopsided optimism and scrubbed of references to war, famine, poverty and most any other Earthly failing—a deliberate decision to hide the defects of our broken world. I know this because my dad, the record’s technical director and a pioneer in the scientific quest to find cosmic civilizations, told me about the hard choices he’d made in selecting the photographs. And I know it because my mom, who recorded the message’s Arabic greeting (“Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday”), helped, too.

For me, as the Voyagers travel through space , they’re not only helping us understand the cosmic context in which we exist; they’re also bearing a memento of my parents into the stars. These spacecraft—and their gleaming paean to Earth—will survive for billions of years. Long after our world, our sun and everything we hold dear becomes unrecognizable, the Voyagers will remain, resolutely speeding ever farther from a home that no longer exists and containing artifacts of a civilization that once was.

That’s why, over nearly half a century, the Voyagers and their interstellar tidings have come to be bigger than the already audacious mission they were designed to accomplish. Their reach is broader. And their inevitable silence will be profound.

“The thought that they’re out there on their own and you can no longer communicate with them—it’s traumatic,” Fox says. “It’s sad. It’s really sad.”

Cosmic Revolution

Voyager 2 FINALLY Sent Back New Images From Space - What Did It Find?

Posted: March 25, 2024 | Last updated: March 25, 2024

In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space. Last March, the agency was compelled to shut down its only means of reaching 12 billion miles across the heavens to this robotic trailblazer. Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world.

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

Nell Greenfieldboyce

This artist's impression shows one of the Voyager spacecraft moving through the darkness of space. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

This artist's impression shows one of the Voyager spacecraft moving through the darkness of space.

The last time Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis saw the Voyager 1 space probe in person, it was the summer of 1977, just before it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Now Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles away, beyond what many consider to be the edge of the solar system. Yet the on-board instrument Krimigis is in charge of is still going strong.

"I am the most surprised person in the world," says Krimigis — after all, the spacecraft's original mission to Jupiter and Saturn was only supposed to last about four years.

These days, though, he's also feeling another emotion when he thinks of Voyager 1.

"Frankly, I'm very worried," he says.

Ever since mid-November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending messages back to Earth that don't make any sense. It's as if the aging spacecraft has suffered some kind of stroke that's interfering with its ability to speak.

"It basically stopped talking to us in a coherent manner," says Suzanne Dodd of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been the project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission since 2010. "It's a serious problem."

Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s. Dodd's team has tried the usual tricks to reset things — with no luck.

It looks like there's a problem with the onboard computer that takes data and packages it up to send back home. All of this computer technology is primitive compared to, say, the key fob that unlocks your car, says Dodd.

"The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do," she says. "It's remarkable that they keep flying, and that they've flown for 46-plus years."

Each of the Voyager probes carries an American flag and a copy of a golden record that can play greetings in many languages. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Each of the Voyager probes carries an American flag and a copy of a golden record that can play greetings in many languages.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, have outlasted many of those who designed and built them. So to try to fix Voyager 1's current woes, the dozen or so people on Dodd's team have had to pore over yellowed documents and old mimeographs.

"They're doing a lot of work to try and get into the heads of the original developers and figure out why they designed something the way they did and what we could possibly try that might give us some answers to what's going wrong with the spacecraft," says Dodd.

She says that they do have a list of possible fixes. As time goes on, they'll likely start sending commands to Voyager 1 that are more bold and risky.

"The things that we will do going forward are probably more challenging in the sense that you can't tell exactly if it's going to execute correctly — or if you're going to maybe do something you didn't want to do, inadvertently," says Dodd.

Linda Spilker , who serves as the Voyager mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that when she comes to work she sees "all of these circuit diagrams up on the wall with sticky notes attached. And these people are just having a great time trying to troubleshoot, you know, the 60's and 70's technology."

"I'm cautiously optimistic," she says. "There's a lot of creativity there."

Still, this is a painstaking process that could take weeks, or even months. Voyager 1 is so distant, it takes almost a whole day for a signal to travel out there, and then a whole day for its response to return.

"We'll keep trying," says Dodd, "and it won't be quick."

In the meantime, Voyager's 1 discombobulation is a bummer for researchers like Stella Ocker , an astronomer with Caltech and the Carnegie Observatories

"We haven't been getting science data since this anomaly started," says Ocker, "and what that means is that we don't know what the environment that the spacecraft is traveling through looks like."

After 35 Years, Voyager Nears Edge Of Solar System

That interstellar environment isn't just empty darkness, she says. It contains stuff like gas, dust, and cosmic rays. Only the twin Voyager probes are far out enough to sample this cosmic stew.

"The science that I'm really interested in doing is actually only possible with Voyager 1," says Ocker, because Voyager 2 — despite being generally healthy for its advanced age — can't take the particular measurements she needs for her research.

Even if NASA's experts and consultants somehow come up with a miraculous plan that can get Voyager 1 back to normal, its time is running out.

The two Voyager probes are powered by plutonium, but that power system will eventually run out of juice. Mission managers have turned off heaters and taken other measures to conserve power and extend the Voyager probes' lifespan.

"My motto for a long time was 50 years or bust," says Krimigis with a laugh, "but we're sort of approaching that."

In a couple of years, the ebbing power supply will force managers to start turning off science instruments, one by one. The very last instrument might keep going until around 2030 or so.

When the power runs out and the probes are lifeless, Krimigis says both of these legendary space probes will basically become "space junk."

"It pains me to say that," he says. While Krimigis has participated in space missions to every planet, he says the Voyager program has a special place in his heart.

Spilker points out that each spacecraft will keep moving outward, carrying its copy of a golden record that has recorded greetings in many languages, along with the sounds of Earth.

"The science mission will end. But a part of Voyager and a part of us will continue on in the space between the stars," says Spilker, noting that the golden records "may even outlast humanity as we know it."

Krimigis, though, doubts that any alien will ever stumble across a Voyager probe and have a listen.

"Space is empty," he says, "and the probability of Voyager ever running into a planet is probably slim to none."

It will take about 40,000 years for Voyager 1 to approach another star; it will come within 1.7 light years of what NASA calls "an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor" — also known as the Little Dipper.

If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years

Knowing that the Voyager probes are running out of time, scientists have been drawing up plans for a new mission that, if funded and launched by NASA, would send another probe even farther out into the space between stars.

"If it happens, it would launch in the 2030s," says Ocker, "and it would reach twice as far as Voyager 1 in just 50 years."

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Title: radiative-convective models of the atmospheres of uranus and neptune: heating sources and seasonal effects.

Abstract: The observations made during the Voyager 2 flyby have shown that the stratosphere of Uranus and Neptune are warmer than expected by previous models. In addition, no seasonal variability of the thermal structure has been observed on Uranus since Voyager 2 era and significant subseasonal variations have been revealed on Neptune. In this paper, we evaluate different realistic heat sources that can induce sufficient heating to warm the atmosphere of these planets and we estimate the seasonal effects on the thermal structure. The seasonal radiative-convective model developed by the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique is used to reproduce the thermal structure of these planets. Three hypotheses for the heating sources are explored separately: aerosol layers, a higher methane mole fraction, and thermospheric conduction. Our modelling indicates that aerosols with plausible scattering properties can produce the requisite heating for Uranus, but not for Neptune. Alternatively, greater stratospheric methane abundances can provide the missing heating on both planets, but the large values needed are inconsistent with current observational constraints. In contrast, adding thermospheric conduction cannot warm alone the stratosphere of both planets. The combination of these heat sources is also investigated. In the upper troposphere of both planets, the meridional thermal structures produced by our model are found inconsistent with those retrieved from Voyager 2/IRIS data. Furthermore, our models predict seasonal variations should exist within the stratospheres of both planets while observations showed that Uranus seems to be invariant to meridional contrasts and only subseasonal temperature trends are visible on Neptune. However, a warm south pole is seen in our simulations of Neptune as observed since 2003.

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