Earhart, Tempest or MUSE?
Fans of planet Uranus have many concepts to call the subsequent mission there, if a casual Internet ballot is any indication.
ExploreIGO, a Twitter fan account dedicated to icy worlds, requested its neighborhood yesterday what to name a spacecraft visiting the large blue world.
“We want to know, what would YOU name the #Uranus Orbiter & Probe Mission?” the account asked (opens in new tab), producing tens of 1000’s of likes, retweets and feedback. That identify the account references is an early stage proposal for NASA to lastly revisit the planet that hasn’t seen an up-close view since Voyager 2 swung by in 1986.
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Embedded with the tweet is a canopy based mostly on a 2021 proposal by three scientists led by Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The group instructed the U.S. decadal survey of planetary science {that a} spacecraft to Uranus is a “journey whose time has come.”
Uranus was voted the top destination by the neighborhood in April after this proposal course of, which was led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The decadal committee referred to as for a $4 billion flagship mission combining a Uranus orbiter and probe, to look at the icy large’s wild climate and enigmatic options from up shut. It can be the primary time a smaller icy gas giant will get an in depth mission, after others visited the a lot bigger Jupiter and Saturn.
The mission, if accepted, would go away Earth in 2031 or so and take 13 years to maneuver to the outer solar system, however not like Voyager, it could orbit Uranus for a few years as a substitute of simply swinging by. But the mission is in no way a performed deal. It requires funding and a measure of scientific and technical will to get the formidable spacecraft proposal collectively.
In the meantime, observatories just like the Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory proceed to watch Uranus from afar to have a look at its environment, rings and moons.
The tentative nature of the Uranus mission did not cease Twitter from sharing its naming concepts. Community favorites (opens in new tab) reference every thing from Shakespeare to polar exploration to the space shuttle program. Some examples embody:
- Caroline, after astronomer Caroline Herschel; she labored alongside her brother William, who’s popularly credited as discovering the primary two identified moons of Uranus;
- Discovery, after NASA’s most-flown space shuttle (which itself was named after one of many two ships utilized by British explorer James Cook when he ‘found’ Hawaii);
- Earhart, after aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart;
- Endurance Orbiter and Shackleton Probe, that are the ship and chief (respectively) of the Ernest Shackleton expedition to Antarctica in 1914-17
- M.U.S.E, an acronym for Mission Uranus Science Expedition;
- Se7en, an homage to its seventh planet place from the sun together with a 1995 thriller starring Morgan Freeman;
- Tempest, after the Shakespeare play. (Uranus moon names (opens in new tab)historically come from Shakespeare characters, or characters from Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.”)
And sure, there have been loads of butt joke names for the Uranus probe, however we opted to highlight a number of the extra surprisingly restrained ones.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
