The Voyager 2 probe flew past Uranus in 1986 and its data greatly contributed to scientific knowledge of that planet, although the impact may have been less than expected as this mission took place at a true solar event.
The data from this mission was reviewed by a team of researchers led by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (US space agency) and published their results in the journal Nature Astronomy, Efe news agency reported on Monday.
Voyager 2, launched in 1977, flew past Uranus in 1986, in the only manned mission to that planet, and then continued its journey beyond the Solar System. .
Researchers have now revealed that this flyby may have occurred under unusual conditions, when its magnetosphere was unusually compressed by the solar wind, which is why it could knowledge of the Uranus system to be more limited than previously thought.
Planetary magnetospheres (the region around a planet that is controlled by its magnetic field) affect the environment around a planet, and understanding their properties is critical to mission planning.
The seventh planet in the solar system, according to the researcher’s data, would have a unique, strongly asymmetric magnetosphere, which appeared to lack plasma – an element common to other planets – and had electron belts or -normally intense, full of energy.
The properties of this unique measurement have been used as a basis for understanding Uranus’ magnetic field, but these anomalies have been difficult to explain without complex physics.
The team, led by Jamie Jasinski, reviewed data from the spacecraft before the flyby and found that they encountered Uranus shortly after an intense solar wind event, when a stream of charged particles was released if spread from the atmosphere of the sun star.
The state in which Voyager 2 observed Uranus’ magnetosphere would indeed be “irregular and compressed” and the team believes that this happens “less than 5% of the time”.
If the spacecraft had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have found a magnetosphere similar to that of the other giant planets in the solar system – Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune – without any anomalous features.
The authors believe that there may be a very low probability that Titania and Oberon (the outermost moons of Uranus) orbit outside the magnetosphere, which could allow scientists to detect subsurface oceans. to find a surface without interfering with them.
The interpretation of the magnetosphere of Uranus as a real one “could only be the result of a flyby that occurred under extreme conditions of an ascending solar wind, considered the authors of the study, who remember that knowledge of ‘ this planet is still “very limited”.
2024-11-12 00:33:00
#catastrophic #solar #event #obscured #Uranus #data #obtained #Renascença
