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Missions could see NASA spacecraft heading to Uranus and Neptune
- randomerr 9y agoIs that the best or worst pun ever?
- slumberlust 9y agoTitle gore.
- huangc10 9y agoOriginal Title: "NASA WANTS TO PROBE URANUS IN SEARCH OF GAS" All jokes aside, these missions are still pretty far off and article doesn't really go into depth of what this research can help accomplish for future generations. Thoughts?
- walrus01 9y ago(deleted)
- naeemtee 9y agoKinda abandoned any semblance of subtlety at the end there lol
- hrasyid 9y agoJust curious, was the word pronounced the same way as today when they picked the planet's name? Or was it picked by non-English speaking people?
- dzink 9y agoIt sounds bad only in English and partly because of the foreign spelling. In Bulgarian it the name spells and reads “Uran”.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> In Bulgarian it the name spells and reads “Uran” Uranus was discovered by British-Hanoverian William Herschel [1] and named after the Greek god of the sky, Οὐρανός [2], which anglifies to Ouranos. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_(mythology)
- dzink 9y agoThe comical pronunciation is only comical when Our-/Ur- as a prefix resembles a relevant word in your language. The second part of the joke comes from the greek spelling/pronunciation which is also not used by all countries/languages referring to the same planet.
- Sharlin 9y agoIt's still spelled "Uh-RAH-nus". Nothing has changed.
- sosuke 9y agoGreat video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ppbbYXMxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ppbbYXMxE
- NeoBasilisk 9y agoIsn't it kind of impossible to know what there might be to learn there until you actually look?
- Baeocystin 9y agoThe unexpected EDI quip when doing so in Mass Effect 2 was worth a chuckle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-CDNLYZ0zA#t=15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-CDNLYZ0zA#t=15s
- gadders 9y agoI worked for a large bank that had decided to name the meeting rooms in their Paris office after planets. If I was doing a meeting with Paris colleagues I always tried to book the Uranus room so I could start the meeting with HILARIOUS comments like: "Are you talking from Uranus?" "How many people are in Uranus today?"
- lowken10 9y agoHa your anus!!!
- searine 9y agoCancel SLS. Cancel Orion. Mass produce satellites and space station modules instead.
- wil421 9y agoThese programs for NASA are just as much a job creation program as it is a mission. I think with Trump the easiest sell would be more American manufacturing than a Uranus mission.
- searine 9y agoConstellation/SLS was important when there wasn't a commercial launch market because the programs maintained technical and manufacturing know-how. Now that there are several competitive and reliable commercial launch providers who maintain that know-how, we need to stop subsidizing bloated defense contractors and instead spend that money on buying launches and making satellites.
- wil421 9y agoWhy would the US give up all of their launch capabilities to private companies? From a strategic point of view it’s not a good approach. I’m sure someone in Washington is making a similar case. I agree there should be a balence but NASA shouldn’t have to solely rely on the likes of Space X. Bloated defense contractors are a symptom of the problem, look at the scope creep of the F35. Is it the government contractors or unclear/ever changing requirements?
- elsonrodriguez 9y agoI don't know that NASA has ever built a heavy launch system in-house without contractor help. What's missing is a few more start-ups like SpaceX to totally crowd out the likes of Boeing from the contractor feeding trough.
- wil421 9y ago
- TangoTrotFox 9y agoI really do wish NASA had a focus. The 60s showed the power of NASA given a clear goal and direction, but now a days they feel like they're operating a mile wide and an inch deep. Probes are great, but I think many overestimate the amount of information they can genuinely provide. Even on Mars where we have had multiple rovers on the surface, there are still ongoing debates about things such as whether the streaks on the planet's surface are water, which NASA made a large announcement of, or indeed just sand which is where the latest interpretation stands. And that's for a very peaceful and close planet (in comparison to Uranus or Neptune) that we ostensibly have a great understanding of. I don't really care what their goal would be, as long as it would be a goal that they could work towards - a base on the moon, a base on mars, expanding the ISS, or anything - preferably with a human element as that's what attracts people to space, and thus gets the money to make these missions become reality. But these probes are not really advancing society. And here I would make an exception for things like the Kepler missions. Those were a directed mission with a specific, valuable, and new purpose that could (and did) provide information that substantially advanced society. Let's go shoot some probes off around Uranus and Neptune and grab some pics and atmospheric readings is better than nothing but it feels like spending funding for the sake of spending funding.
- mturmon 9y agoNot a down voter, but: This isn't accurate. Planetary science (as in the OP) tends to be more diverse and exploratory than Earth or Astrophysics, but it still has a strategy. It's not just stamp collecting. See: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/focus-areas https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/focus-areas
- TangoTrotFox 9y agoI'm not sure what your link is supposed to show?
- mturmon 9y agoWell, you wondered, "I don't really care what their goal would be, as long as it would be a goal that they could work towards..." and that link shows the basic four orienting science questions (right panel in blue text) - how did life begin, how did the solar system evolve, how did the planets originate, etc. Those are the top-level questions that the National Academies panel doing the Decadal Survey arrived at and that motivates the portfolio of planetary missions that are planned. I would have linked to the Decadal Survey (overview at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Science_Decadal_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Science_Decadal_Surv...), but the report itself is a very long pdf - and this gets into the strategy in detail. For instance, the next Mars mission (Mars 2020) is set up to address the "life" question, and the "how did the planet [Mars] evolve" question, etc.
- forapurpose 9y agoI wait and hope for someone with more planetary knowledge than I have to explain the lack of interest in Venus as a habitable planet and thus the center of NASA's attention ahead of Neptune, Uranus, and of course, Mars. Based on what I've read, which includes a paper from a NASA (or was it JPL?) engineer, Venus' surface is not very hospitabl, but at a certain altitude it looks like an oasis in the Solar System: Venus (at ~50-55 km altitude) / Mars (surface): (all stats from Wikipedia, and yes not always complete or comparable) * Gravity: 0.9G / 0.38G * Pressure: ~1 atm / 0.00628 atm (prevents liquid water) * Temperature: 27-75 deg C / -63 deg C (mean) * Shortest distance from Earth (for logistics): 40M km / 55M km * Sunlight (energy): More than Earth / 43% of Earth Also, oxygen and nitrogen are lighter than the CO2-heavy atmosphere, so a balloon of O2 and N2 would float conveniently at 50 km. The CO2 in the atmosphere also could be a valuable resource.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoThere is practically no advantage to living on Venus other than that you get gravity. The only local resources available are the atmosphere, and you need to create a floating habitat that is also an interplanetary spacecraft port. Frankly, that's actually pretty far outside our realm of technology at present. Mars has many more advantages in comparison. For one you can build on the surface of the planet. There are many resources on Mars that can be exploited almost immediately and many others that can be exploited over a longer term: the atmosphere can be used to help produce rocket propellant, water can be used to aid in that as well. Things like iron/steel, glass, plastics, concrete, etc. can all be produced on Mars with a minimal industrial base within the first decade of colonization, with increasing quality and throughput over time. These things are important because they significantly advantage Martian colonies in terms of their ability to be partially self-sufficient and partially self-reliant in regards to expansion. On Venus practically every ounce of material in the colony needs to be shipped from Earth, it's scarcely better than an orbital station. On Mars you can rely on local supplies for water, for propellant for the return trip, for fuel and oxidizer for ground machinery (mining vehicles) and emergency backup power. You can grow crops using Martian sunlight, Martian CO2, Martian water, Martian Nitrogen, and Martian soil. You can use solar energy for power and sunlight to grow crops as on Earth, the lower light levels are slightly misleading, Mars doesn't have routine cloud cover and has a thinner atmosphere so the average amount of watt-hours per area per day on Mars are very similar to what they are on Earth. You can use regolith for radiation shielding and in construction (building roads, for example). You can manufacture concrete, steel, glass, and plastics using local materials so that you can begin building things like habitats, industrial facilities, etc. using substantially locally produced materials while relying on Earth-produced components for only a subset of the mass of the things that get built, and an ever decreasing subset at that. A Mars colony would be one that should grow in size and capabilities by leaps and bounds year over year as local industry and agriculture ramps up, as exploitation of local resources increases and improves, as techniques for making use of those local resources scale up and become increasingly sophisticated. Venus just doesn't rate in comparison. Nobody has a design for how you'd build a floating habitat on Venus that would be reliable enough to trust for decades. One that could also serve as a spaceport for spaceships. We have the technology to tackle Mars colonization now, it only requires following through on doing it. And Mars has the resources to make colonization a feasible concern that increases its ability to support a population, increases its level of technological sophistication, increases its industrial and agricultural base substantially every year, year after year, indefinitely. That's why Mars is such an attractive target. You can plant a civilization there in a way that you can't, with our level of technology, on the Moon or Venus.
- primeblue 9y agoHumans need a backup plan, we need to expand into space. As we become augmented with AI and robotics, regular Earthers will discriminate and persecute these new people.
- galaga99 9y agoCoincidentally this week Fermat's Library highlighted a paper about the Voyager mission, the only spacecraft (Voyager 2) to visit Uranus and Neptune. Super interesting paper. Turns out Voyager was the first spacecraft that could be reprogrammed "mid flight". In fact, if it wasn't for that we would have not gotten back images of Uranus or Neptune! https://fermatslibrary.com/s/voyager-mission-telecommunication-firsts https://fermatslibrary.com/s/voyager-mission-telecommunicati...
- Symmetry 9y agoI'm glad, we really need to better understand how the Ice Giants[1] in our solar system work. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_giant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_giant
- connorbyrne 9y agoReally... nobody is going to mention the last sentence? [rolls eyes]
- LyalinDotCom 9y agoI can't in good faith upvote a story on a website that has more junk advertisement then content per character and has stories like "VOYAGER 2 MAY HAVE BEEN HACKED AS IT ENTERED DEEP SPACE" featured next to this.
- akkat 9y agoThe title of this linked article is "NASA Wants To Probe Uranus In Search Of Gas "