The chance of liquid oceans hiding beneath the surface of moons orbiting Uranus has enticed NASA to begin planning a new mission that will send a spacecraft to the ice giant.
The mission is still in the conceptual planning stage. If the mission moves forward, it would be only the second in history to visit Uranus, after Voyager 2 flew by in 1986. And if it finds liquid water oceans inside Uranus’s moons, we might have the answer to a profound question to aid our search for life among the stars.
Doug Hemingway, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who has developed an ocean-finding computer model for the Uranus mission, says finding liquid water oceans in Uranus’s moons could mean that there are more worlds across our galaxy that hold a key ingredient for life than we know. “Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist,” Hemingway said in a statement.
All moons oscillate or “sway” as they orbit, but moons with oceans inside wobble more due to the sloshing liquid inside of them, so finding out how much the Uranian moons sway in orbit may give scientists the information they need to determine whether or not Uranus’s moons have oceans inside of them.
These sways are measured using a spacecraft’s cameras. Using this method previously, scientists figured out Saturn’s moon Enceladus contains an ocean. Hemingway’s computer model is designed to help the same method work on the Uranian moons.
Using theoretical calculations Hemingway came up with, the computer model created a range of scenarios that could occur when the spacecraft flies past Uranus. So, when the spacecraft gathers a measurement of a moon swaying, NASA can use it to describe characteristics of the interior ocean.
The model Hemingway produced, “could be the difference between discovering an ocean or finding we don’t have that capability when we arrive,” UTIG Research Associate Professor Krista Soderlund, a member of the Europa Clipper mission science team who wasn’t involved with this research, said in the statement.
In October, new research published in Planetary Science Journal suggested one of Uranus’s moons, Miranda, may have once held a liquid water ocean below the surface. The research drew on decades-old images from Voyager 2, which scientists sought to reverse engineer to see if they contained clues about any kind of internal structures that would explain why Miranda’s exterior appeared the way it did when Voyager 2 photographed it.
The seventh planet from the sun continues to surprise us. Just last year, astronomers in Chile discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus that’s only 5 miles (8 km) wide.
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