voyager 2 uranus video

News | January 22, 2021

35 years ago: voyager 2 explores uranus.

Left: The launch of Voyager 2 in 1977. Right: The trajectories of Voyager 1 and 2 through the outer solar system.

In January 1986, NASA's Voyager 2 became the first, and so far the only, spacecraft to explore Uranus, the second to last stop on its journey through the outer solar system. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages Voyagers 1 and 2, twin spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets.

Initially planned to fly by Jupiter and Saturn only, Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs once every 175 years to complete two additional encounters in the outer solar system. Following Voyager 1’s successful exploration of Saturn and Titan in November 1980, on Jan. 8, 1981, NASA approved Voyager 2 to maintain a trajectory that, following its encounter with Saturn in August 1981, would then take it past Uranus in 1986, and if the spacecraft was still functioning, fly by Neptune in 1989.

Each Voyager spacecraft carried a suite of 11 instruments, including:

• an imaging science system consisting of narrow-angle and wide-angle cameras to photograph the planet and its satellites.
• a radio science system to determine the planet’s physical properties.
• an infrared interferometer spectrometer to investigate local and global energy balance and atmospheric composition.
• an ultraviolet spectrometer to measure atmospheric properties.
• a magnetometer to analyze the planet’s magnetic field and interaction with the solar wind.
• a plasma spectrometer to investigate microscopic properties of plasma ions.
• a low energy charged particle device to measure fluxes and distributions of ions.
• a cosmic ray detection system to determine the origin and behavior of cosmic radiation.
• a planetary radio astronomy investigation to study radio emissions from Jupiter.
• a photopolarimeter to measure the planet’s surface composition.
• a plasma wave system to study the planet’s magnetosphere.

At the time of the Voyager encounter, Uranus had five known moons and a set of dark rings first observed the year the spacecraft left Earth. Astronomers had named the moons, in order of distance from the planet, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon, after characters in works by William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Because of Uranus’ great distance from the Sun, engineers made changes to Voyager’s imaging techniques to accommodate light levels only 25% of what they were during the Saturn encounter. Engineers programmed image motion compensation techniques into Voyager’s computer to maintain clear photographs at the required 15-second exposure times coupled with the spacecraft’s velocity. NASA also upgraded the ground-based tracking antennas of the Deep Space Network to increase their sensitivity to receive Voyager’s signals from Uranus’ distance.

Voyager 2 began to observe Uranus on November 4, 1985, by creating a series of time-lapse videos of the planet and its surroundings. Due to Uranus’ axial tilt of nearly 98 degrees to its orbital plane (the planet is basically lying on its side), Voyager 2’s encounter resembled aiming at a bull’s eye, with the planet at the center and its moons and rings orbiting around it. Due to this unusual orientation, the Sun illuminated only the southern hemispheres of the planet and its moons. It also required Voyager 2 to complete its close encounter observations in just a few hours, compared with several days for the Jupiter and Saturn flybys. On Dec. 30, Voyager 2 discovered its first new moon, eventually named Puck, orbiting closer to Uranus than Miranda. Engineers at JPL resolved an issue with the spacecraft’s imaging system that resulted in highly streaked photographs just three days before the closest encounter.

​ - John Uri NASA Johnson Space Center

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Revisiting Decades-Old Voyager 2 Data, Scientists Find One More Secret

The ice giant Uranus appears to be losing a bit of its atmosphere to space, perhaps siphoned away by the planet's magnetic field.

Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, icy-cold Uranus.

Over the next few hours, Voyager 2 flew within 50,600 miles (81,433 kilometers) of Uranus' cloud tops, collecting data that revealed two new rings, 11 new moons and temperatures below minus 353 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 214 degrees Celsius). The dataset is still the only up-close measurements we have ever made of the planet.

Three decades later, scientists reinspecting that data found one more secret.

Unbeknownst to the entire space physics community, 34 years ago Voyager 2 flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble that may have been whisking Uranus' atmosphere out to space. The finding, reported in Geophysical Research Letters , raises new questions about the planet's one-of-a-kind magnetic environment.

A Wobbly Magnetic Oddball

Planetary atmospheres all over the solar system are leaking into space. Hydrogen springs from Venus to join the solar wind, the continuous stream of particles escaping the Sun. Jupiter and Saturn eject globs of their electrically-charged air. Even Earth's atmosphere leaks . (Don't worry, it will stick around for another billion years or so.)

The effects are tiny on human timescales, but given long enough, atmospheric escape can fundamentally alter a planet's fate. For a case in point, look at Mars.

"Mars used to be a wet planet with a thick atmosphere," said Gina DiBraccio, space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN mission. "It evolved over time" - 4 billion years of leakage to space - "to become the dry planet we see today."

Atmospheric escape is driven by a planet's magnetic field, which can both help and hinder the process. Scientists believe magnetic fields can protect a planet, fending off the atmosphere-stripping blasts of the solar wind. But they can also create opportunities for escape, like the giant globs cut loose from Saturn and Jupiter when magnetic field lines become tangled. Either way, to understand how atmospheres change, scientists pay close attention to magnetism.

That's one more reason Uranus is such a mystery. Voyager 2's 1986 flyby revealed just how magnetically weird the planet is.

"The structure, the way that it moves ... ," DiBraccio said, "Uranus is really on its own."

Unlike any other planet in our solar system, Uranus spins almost perfectly on its side - like a pig on a spit roast - completing a barrel roll once every 17 hours. Its magnetic field axis points 60 degrees away from that spin axis, so as the planet spins, its magnetosphere - the space carved out by its magnetic field - wobbles like a poorly thrown football. Scientists still don't know how to model it.

This oddity drew DiBraccio and her coauthor Dan Gershman, a fellow Goddard space physicist, to the project. Both were part of a team working out plans for a new mission to the "ice giants" Uranus and Neptune, and they were looking for mysteries to solve.

Uranus' strange magnetic field, last measured more than 30 years ago, seemed like a good place to start.

So they downloaded Voyager 2's magnetometer readings, which monitored the strength and direction of the magnetic fields near Uranus as the spacecraft flew by. With no idea what they'd find, they zoomed in closer than previous studies, plotting a new datapoint every 1.92 seconds. Smooth lines gave way to jagged spikes and dips. And that's when they saw it: a tiny zigzag with a big story.

"Do you think that could be ... a plasmoid?" Gershman asked DiBraccio, catching sight of the squiggle.

Little known at the time of Voyager 2's flyby, plasmoids have since become recognized as an important way planets lose mass. These giant bubbles of plasma, or electrified gas, pinch off from the end of a planet's magnetotail - the part of its magnetic field blown back by the Sun like a windsock. With enough time, escaping plasmoids can drain the ions from a planet's atmosphere, fundamentally changing its composition.

They had been observed at Earth and other planets, but no one had detected plasmoids at Uranus - yet.

DiBraccio ran the data through her processing pipeline, and the results came back clean. "I think it definitely is," she said.

The Bubble Escapes

The plasmoid DiBraccio and Gershman found occupied a mere 60 seconds of Voyager 2's 45-hour-long flight by Uranus. It appeared as a quick up-down blip in the magnetometer data. "But if you plotted it in 3D, it would look like a cylinder," Gershman said.

Comparing their results to plasmoids observed at Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, they estimated a cylindrical shape at least 127,000 miles (204,000 kilometers) long, and up to roughly 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) across. Like all planetary plasmoids, it was full of charged particles - mostly ionized hydrogen, the authors believe.?

Readings from inside the plasmoid - as Voyager 2 flew through it - hinted at its origins. Whereas some plasmoids have a twisted internal magnetic field, DiBraccio and Gershman observed smooth, closed magnetic loops. Such loop-like plasmoids are typically formed as a spinning planet flings bits of its atmosphere to space. "Centrifugal forces take over, and the plasmoid pinches off," Gershman said. According to their estimates, plasmoids like that one could account for between 15% and 55% of atmospheric mass loss at Uranus, a greater proportion than either Jupiter or Saturn. It may well be the dominant way Uranus sheds its atmosphere to space.

How has plasmoid escape changed Uranus over time? With only one set of observations, it's hard to say.

"Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterize the entire Earth," DiBraccio said. "Obviously it's not going to show you anything about what the Sahara or Antarctica is like."

But the findings help focus new questions about the planet. The remaining mystery is part of the draw. "It's why I love planetary science," DiBraccio said. "You're always going somewhere you don't really know."

The twin Voyager spacecraft were built by and continue to be operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

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• Where Are They Now
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golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
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Galleries of Images Voyager Took

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you'll find some of those iconic images, including "The Pale Blue Dot" - famously described by Carl Sagan - and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.

Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

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.

In the summer of 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe the planet Neptune, its final planetary target. Passing about 4,950 kilometers (3,000 miles) above Neptune's north pole, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to any planet since leaving Earth 12 years ago. Five hours later, Voyager 2 passed about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Neptune's largest moon, Triton, the last solid body the spacecraft will have an opportunity to study.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

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Voyager 2 image of uranus.

This is an image of the planet Uranus taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

Uranus has something unexpected deep inside it

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Scientists have done a bit of digging inside Uranus , and found something surprising.

They reckon there’s much more methane in there than we thought.

Well, the idea that Uranus is full of gas may not come as much of a surprise to many – but weirdly, it isn’t in gas form.

No, all the methane packed into Uranus is either frozen, or ‘mushy’.

In fact, around 10% of Uranus may be made up of this mushy methane, rather than full of water ice as previously thought – hence being nicknamed an ‘icy giant’. 

The new theory is all down to how Uranus grew to its massive size back when the solar system was forming.

All the plants started life in a massive dust cloud around the Sun. Gradually, this dust started to group together, like dust bunnies under the sofa. As they grew, they gathered more dust, getting bigger and bigger. 

This meant their gravitational pull also increased, allowing them to pull in even more matter – including objects known as planetesimals, which can range in size from a few miles wide to several hundred miles across.

These massive objects, which became lodged inside Uranus, are thought to be similar to comets that come from the Kuiper Belt, found way out beyond the planets.

However, if this is true, then it poses a bit of a head scratcher. These comets are not made up of useful material for making water – so if Uranus is full of them, why would it also be full of ice?

That’s the question posed and answered by Uri Malamud and his colleagues in a new study yet to be peer-reviewed . 

Because it is so far away, we know very little about Uranus. Only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has ever flown past it, but using data from this and Earth-based telescopes, astronomers have been able to predict the planet has a thin hydrogen and helium outer layer, and a rocky core. In between this is thought to lie the icy water – possibly as much as 50,000 as much water as on Earth.

However, using an algorithm to recreate Uranus using a variety of chemicals, the team found the models which most resembled the planet as we know it were those chock full of methane.

The methane is thought to be either in solid chunks, or in a ‘mushy state’ between the planet’s outer layer and the icy layer.

And all this methane in Uranus could explain where the icy water came from, forming when hydrogen in the young planet reacted with the carbon and organic-rich materials in the planetesimals.

So there you have it – without all that methane, Uranus wouldn’t be what it is today.

Oh, and the same probably goes for Neptune.

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Engineers attempt to fix a computer glitch on Voyager 1

Voyager 1's system that sends data home is malfunctioning, preventing the computer from operating as it should.

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Last November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft began sending gibberish radio signals back to Earth. Engineers have now identified the problem, but trying to repair a 46-year-old device on a craft 24 billion kilometres from Earth is not easy.

Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977 on a reconnaissance mission to Jupiter and Saturn. They were designed to fly past the giant planets to obtain closeup images of those distant worlds and their myriad of moons.

Both spacecraft performed beyond expectations, discovering many new moons — some covered in ice , one with active volcanoes , another with a thick atmosphere and closeup details of Saturn's rings .  

Following the Saturn encounter, Voyager 1 was flung upwards by Saturn's gravity on a trajectory northward, above the orbital plane in which most of the planets orbit the Sun, out of our solar system. NASA extended its mission and from there it went on to become the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space in 2012. 

Voyager 2, however, was aimed toward Uranus and Neptune, which were conveniently positioned in a rare alignment with Jupiter and Saturn making it the only spacecraft to visit those distant worlds.

Following the grand tour of the outer solar system, Voyager 2 was also tossed out toward interstellar space in 2018 when its mission was extended and where it continues on its journey today. 

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While their primary missions were over, both spacecraft were still in good health, thanks largely to their nuclear power sources or Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG). These containers hold small amounts of plutonium which provide heat that is turned directly into electricity with no moving parts. They have an expected lifetime of around 50 years and have kept the Voyagers' instruments running.

Now, as both spacecraft continue their journey through the space between the stars, they are showing signs of their age.

For Voyager 1, the problem seems to be in the flight data subsystem (FDS) that packages data from the scientific instruments for transmission to Earth. The scientists don't know if the faulty module was corrupted by cosmic rays or just worn out, but they say they're optimistic they may be able to work around the problem, although it will take some time.

Engineers have confirmed that corrupted memory aboard my twin <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Voyager1?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Voyager1</a> has been causing it to send unreadable data to Earth. It may take months, but our team is optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally again: <a href="https://t.co/qe5iQUu4Oj">https://t.co/qe5iQUu4Oj</a> <a href="https://t.co/AGFBZFz53v">https://t.co/AGFBZFz53v</a> &mdash; @NASAVoyager

The challenge is that the computers were built in the 1970s using old code and send data very slowly by today's standards.

In addition, these computers are so deep in space, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal from Voyager 1 to reach Earth. That means the controllers on the ground have to wait 45 hours for each two-way communication with the spacecraft.

Given how very, very far they are from home, if something goes wrong with them, it's up to engineers on the ground to fix it by sending radio signals since reaching them for repair missions isn't possible. We're a long way from the fictional warp drive and sub-space communication that made life so easy on the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek fame. 

The twin Voyagers are now the most distant objects ever sent from Earth; a demonstration of how vast space is and how slow our spacecraft are. In 1977, I attended the launch of Voyager 2 when my hair was black and skin was smooth. This one mission with Voyager 1 and 2 has occupied a good chunk of my lifetime.

In another few years, the RTGs on both Voyagers are expected to run down to the point where the spacecraft will no longer be able to communicate with Earth. They will just continue to drift in silence among the stars of the Milky Way for billions of years. 

However, there is one item on both Voyagers that will continue to function, the Golden Record, which carries a message from Earth to anyone out there who may find the spacecraft in the future.

The chances of them being found are astronomically small, but they will become the longest running experiment in human history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob McDonald is the host of CBC Radio's award-winning weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. He is also a science commentator for CBC News Network and CBC TV's The National. He has received 12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

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