Slice of History - 40th Anniversary of Voyager 2’s Uranus Encounter

January 24th marks the 40th anniversary of Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus! This painting by Donald Davis (1981) depicts this groundbreaking event that revealed previously unknown information about Uranus, its rings, moons, and atmosphere. The spacecraft discovered eleven new moons and two new rings, as well as studied its cold atmosphere through time-lapse videos that tracked wind speeds and cloud movement.

Voyager 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs only once every 175 years to complete additional encounters in the outer solar system. About 11 hours before its closest approach to Uranus, the spacecraft entered the planet’s magnetosphere. Voyager 2 also imaged the planet’s large satellites, accomplishing the spacecraft’s closest encounter made with any celestial body to that point, just 18,000 miles from Miranda.

As Voyager 2 traveled away from Uranus, it returned images of the planet and its rings beautifully backlit by the Sun and concluded its encounter phase on 25 February 1986. In all, Voyager 2 returned more than 7000 images and a wealth of information that scientists analyzed for years to come. This led to a March 2020 reanalysis by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, indicating that a plasmoid – a giant magnetic bubble – may have been slowly whisking the planet’s atmosphere out to space. CL#25-4782

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