Member-only story
Space Time
The Case for Visiting the Outer Planets
Scientists are begging NASA to go back to Uranus and Neptune
Until NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft reached Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s, the outer planets were simply fuzzy blobs that could only be viewed through ground-based telescopes. We had no idea what they actually looked like.
But when Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus in 1986, the space probe revealed a light teal planet with rings. Three years after the Uranus flyby, Voyager 2 introduced us to Neptune, a vibrant ultramarine blue planet with a dark oval storm that penetrated deep into the atmosphere. Suddenly these two ambiguous blobs became real worlds — as real as our own. They had clouds and storms as well as bands of winds and weather all their own. After hundreds of years of wondering, we finally glimpsed these distant worlds comparatively up close. So, why haven’t we been back for 30 years?
Funding is a perennial issue for NASA, and there simply isn’t enough money to reach every planet scientists want to visit. There’s also the sheer distance of Uranus and Neptune: Uranus is about two billion miles away from Earth, and Neptune is roughly another billion miles farther. Reaching these planets with the technology we have now can easily take a decade.
