NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft made the first, and so far only, visit to Uranus. It came within 81,500 kilometers of the planet’s cloud tops and discovered 10 new moons, two new rings and a magnetic field stronger than Saturn’s. A really fruitful visit.
The mysterious gaseous planet was visited by the mythical Voyager 2 for about five hours, during which the ship carried out a detailed study while sending us some impressive images of the planet and its moons.
“We knew that Uranus would be different because it’s tilted to one side,” said Ed Stone, a Voyager mission scientist based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena since 1972.
We discovered that Uranus was the coldest known planet in our solar system, even though it is not the furthest from our star. And it is because it does not have any type of internal heat source.
Although Uranus is visible to the naked eye, it was long mistaken for a star due to the planet’s darkness and slow orbit.
Who discovered the planet?
It was the British astronomer William Herschel who discovered Uranus on March 13, 1781 with his telescope while surveying the stars. Suddenly, he realized that there was a star that looked different, and after a year, Herschel realized that the star was following a planetary orbit . It was Uranus, the only planet named after a Greek god instead of a Roman one.
In 2021, therefore, it will be 240 years since its discovery.
Reference: NASA
