Exploration of Uranus
[3][4] Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986, coming within 81,500 km (50,600 miles) of the planet's cloud tops.
This was the probe's first solo planetary flyby, since Voyager 1 ended its tour of the outer planets at Saturn's moon Titan.
The intensity of radiation within the belts is such that irradiation would quickly darken (within 100,000 years) any methane trapped in the icy surfaces of the inner moons and ring particles.
A high layer of haze was detected around the sunlit pole, which also was found to radiate large amounts of ultraviolet light, a phenomenon dubbed "electroglow".
Detailed images from Voyager 2's flyby of the moon showed huge oval structures termed coronae flanked by faults as deep as 20 km (12 mi), terraced layers, and a mixture of old and young surfaces.
Ariel has the brightest and possibly youngest surface of all the Uranian moons and also appears to have undergone geologic activity that led to many fault valleys and what seem to be extensive flows of icy material.
In March 2020, after reevaluating old data recorded by Voyager 2, NASA astronomers reported the detection of a large magnetic bubble known as a plasmoid, which may be leaking Uranus's atmosphere into space.
[11][3][12] In 2009, a team of planetary scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory advanced possible designs for a solar-powered Uranus orbiter.
[4][16][17] A mission to Uranus is one of several proposed uses under consideration for the unmanned variant of NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) currently in development.
[19] In 2015, NASA announced it had begun a feasibility study into the possibility of orbital missions to Uranus and Neptune, within a budget of $2 billion in 2015 dollars.
[21] MUSE, conceived in 2012 and proposed in 2015, is a European concept for a dedicated mission to the planet Uranus to study its atmosphere, interior, moons, rings, and magnetosphere.
[23] Students at Purdue University released their Flagship-class version of OCEANUS around that time; it featured more than twice as many instruments in a more compact design with a larger high-gain antenna, as well as two atmospheric probes for Saturn and Uranus rather than the previous concept's sole Uranian one.
The spacecraft's dry mass is 1210 kg and it carries four scientific instruments: magnetometer, microwave radiometer, wide angle camera and plasma wave detector.
[25] In October 2021, a team of mostly JPL and Ames Research Center staffers suggested another New Frontiers class mission be undertaken preferably in the late 2040s, called the Uranian Magnetosphere and Moons Investigator.
