NASA's Uranus Mission Is Running Out of Time

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March 30, 2023

This week, we’re worrying about running out of time. Not in any personal sense (although none of us is getting any younger), but rather concerning NASA’s plans for a multibillion-dollar “flagship” mission to Uranus, the long-overlooked ice giant planet in the solar system hinterlands. Though the mission’s targeted launch is almost a decade away, there are sound—and disturbing—reasons to fear the space agency does not have enough time (and money) to hit that deadline. The scientific repercussions of such delays are considerable: Among other things, missing an early-2030s launch window would likely prevent researchers from studying the changing of seasons on Uranus—something that only occurs every 21 years. Elsewhere this week, we also have stories on a rock-flinging asteroid, fading hopes for habitability on a supposedly “Earthlike” exoplanet, the brightest cosmic explosion ever seen, and much more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Planetary Science NASA's Uranus Mission Is Running Out of Time Multiple obstacles might make it hard for NASA to turn its dream of ice giant exploration into a reality any time soon By Shannon Hall

Planetary Science Asteroid Didymos May Spin So Fast It Flings Rocks into Space The asteroid Didymos witnessed its companion get slammed by NASA’s DART spacecraft, and Didymos itself may have interesting activity By Meghan Bartels

Astrophysics Recent Gamma-Ray Burst May Be the Brightest Ever Seen The “absolutely monstrous” cosmic blast is estimated to be a 1-in-10,000-year event By Mike Wall,SPACE.com

Planetary Science JWST Sees No Atmosphere on 'Earthlike' TRAPPIST-1 Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1b is probably an airless rock, but the same may not be true for its six Earth-sized siblings By Alexandra Witze,Nature magazine

Astronomy Mysteriously Young 'Peekaboo' Galaxy Could Reveal Secrets of Early Universe A strange discovery could provide a window into the universe’s earliest galaxies By Allison Gasparini

Artificial Intelligence I Gave ChatGPT an IQ Test. Here's What I Discovered The chatbot was the ideal test taker—it exhibited no trace of test anxiety, poor concentration or lack of effort. And what about that IQ score? By Eka Roivainen

Mathematics Top Math Prize Awarded for Describing the Dynamics of the Flow of Rivers and the Melting of Ice Argentine mathematician Luis Caffarelli has won the 2023 Abel Prize for making natural phenomena more understandable and eliminating dreaded “infinities” from a calculation By Manon Bischoff

Microbiology Mysterious Microbes in Earth's Crust Might Help With the Climate Crisis Wherever we dig and however deep we dig we find microscopic living organisms. Could they eat the carbon we're pumping into the air? By Karen G. Lloyd,Peter Barry,David Terry Fine

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 328, Issue 4

QUOTE OF THE DAY "It's an uphill battle, but we've done this before. We shouldn't just assume we'll be in our graves by the time we get data back from a Uranus mission." Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, on prospects for a Uranus mission in our lifetimes

FROM THE ARCHIVE The Solar System's Loneliest Planets, Revisited Thirty years after a probe visited Neptune, many scientists say now is the time to finally return to that world and Uranus By Shannon Hall | August 2019

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