In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft captured a puzzling image of Uranus, revealing oddities in the planet’s magnetosphere. New research suggests that these anomalies may have been caused by a rare solar wind event that occurred just before the flyby, compressing Uranus’ magnetosphere. This compression could explain the absence of plasma, typically found around other planets, and the unusually intense radiation belts observed. The researchers, led by Jamie Jasinski at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found that the solar wind’s pressure had contracted the magnetosphere by over 10 times, affecting the data collected. They note that Uranus was in this rare state only 4% of the time, meaning that much of the data gathered from the Voyager 2 flyby does not represent the planet’s typical conditions.
This discovery also opens new opportunities for future missions, as the expanded magnetosphere could make it easier to detect subsurface oceans on Uranus’ moons, Titania and Oberon. These moons, within Uranus’ magnetosphere, could reveal evidence of hidden seas beneath their icy surfaces, a potential target for exploration in upcoming missions.
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