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Uranus: Why we should visit the most unloved planet

Uranus is almost certainly the most unloved planet in our solar system. It always seems to get overlooked when the mission invitations go out. Spacecraft have been sent to Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. There is even one on its way to non-planet Pluto. But Uranus does not deserve its dull, or comic, reputation. In fact it is one of the most interesting, exciting and downright weird planets we know of.
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With a volume 60 times that of Earth, Uranus is a compressed mass of toxic gases, including methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, surrounding a small rocky core. (...) Circled by 26 small moons, a few faint rings and a weak magnetic field Uranus appears to be tipped over on its side. Every planet has a slight tilt when it spins – it gives us our seasons – but unlike every other planet in the solar system, Uranus rotates on an axis pointing almost directly at the Sun. Something that Fletcher describes as "really weird".

"Imagine a world where winter lasts 42 Earth years and you don't see the Sun once during that time," he says. "You have this situation where the atmosphere isn't heated for decades and that can lead to some really interesting atmospheric properties."

Fletcher is part of an international team that believes Uranus has been neglected for too long. This group of space scientists and engineers from Europe, the United States and several other nations, including Japan, is working on a $600m mission proposal for the European Space Agency (ESA) with the aim of sending out a space probe, within the next 10 years, to discover why Uranus is so odd. The mission will investigate the atmosphere, magnetic field and capture detailed images of this strange world.

Fonte: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140822-the-mission-to-an-un-loved-planet. Acesso em 25/08/2014. Adaptado.