Uranus has only been visited by a spacecraft once—and Voyager 2 "arrived at just the wrong time," says Jamie Jasinski, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Jasinski is the lead author of a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy that suggests the 1986 flyby happened when solar activity had created very unusual conditions, meaning our understanding of the planet has been wrong for the past 38 years, the New York Times reports. "If we had arrived a week earlier, we would have had a completely different picture of Uranus," Jasinski says.
Jasinski and his co-authors say the flyby "revealed an unusually oblique and off-centred magnetic field" that "has been the basis of our interpretation of Uranus's magnetosphere as the canonical extreme magnetosphere of the solar system; with inexplicably intense electron radiation belts and a severely plasma-depleted magnetosphere." They say they have determined from a review of Voyager 2 data that the extreme conditions were caused by an intense solar wind event known as a "co-rotating interaction region." They believe the conditions observed by Voyager 2 are only present on Uranus around 4% of the time.
The "major mysteries" from the flyby can be explained by the solar wind event, which "compressed the magnetosphere dramatically just before the flyby started," Jasinski tells Gizmodo. The team also concluded that the planet's two outermost moons are inside its magnetosphere, which will make it easier to search for subsurface oceans. "Titania and Oberon are the most likely candidates for harboring oceans because they are slightly larger than the other moons, meaning they can retain heat better, and therefore be warmer," Jasinski says. "This means they are less likely to be completely frozen." NASA plans to launch another Uranus mission in 2032, the Times reports. (More Uranus stories.)
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