What would it not be wish to fall through the clouds of our solar system’s ice giants, Uranus or Neptune? Well, nobody truly knows — but we could be near checking out.
We now have landed on, crashed into, or descended into the clouds of all the planets within the solar system apart from two: Uranus and Neptune. The farthest planets from the sun, these worlds are still shrouded in a certain degree of mystery. This may increasingly soon change, nonetheless. That is because each NASA, within the 2023-2032 Planetary Sciences Decadal Survey, and the ESA, within the Voyage 2050 programme, have stated that a visit to those outer planets is a high priority.
To that end, simulated probes can assist us understand what descending into the clouds of those planets might entail.
As such, scientists recently simulated a probe descending into the atmosphere of the 2 planets. The tests took place on the hypersonic plasma T6 Stalker Tunnel at Oxford University and the University of Stuttgart’s High Enthalpy Flow Diagnostics Group’s plasma wind tunnels.
Related: Uranus up close: What proposed NASA ‘ice giant’ mission could teach us
The T6 Stalker Tunnel is the fastest wind tunnel in Europe, reaching test speeds of 20 kilometers per second (12.4 miles per second.) These tests simulated what a probe descending into the atmosphere of Uranus or Neptune would want to contend with, including heat fluxes and convective heating. Regardless that the atmospheres of those icy giants are very cold, a probe would heat up significantly from entry into the atmosphere. And the speed of such heating is orders of magnitude higher than anything ESA, for example, has needed to cope with to this point.
The tests have already managed to simulate speeds of 19 km per second (11.8 miles per second), but further tests will simulate actual entry rates of 24 km per second (14.9 miles per second.) This speed is comparable to the speed required for a probe to orbit the ice giants.
“To start designing such a system we’d like first to adapt current European testing facilities with a view to reproduce the atmospheric compositions and velocities involved,” Louis Walpot, an aerothermodynamics engineer at ESA, said in a statement.
Unlike their larger siblings Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune contain a notable amount of heavier elements, together with significant levels of methane, the latter of which turn their clouds blue. These planets may harbor oceans of liquid inside their atmospheres and experience diamond rain.
Nonetheless, Uranus and Neptune are the least understood planets in our solar system, so any probe sent over there would give us enormous information in regards to the worlds’ natures. Plus, learning about these ice giants may help us higher understand planetary system formation.