The first unmanned space probe flyby in history of the
planet Uranus by Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986 should
have been an exciting one in the history of planetary
exploration:
* Uranus was the first planet discovered by humans
not thousands of years before written history and
civilization, but in relatively moderns times -
on March 13, 1781 by German musician turned English
astronomer William Herschel, to be exact. I know
others may have viewed Uranus telescopically before
Herschel, be he was the first one to figure out
that it was a planet and not a comet or star.
Theoretically one could see Uranus with unaided
vision from Earth, but it would have been too dim
for our ancestors to really notice it, even in
their non-light polluted night skies (at least
none ever said they did that made it to our time).
* Uranus was later found to be a world tipped on its
side compared to the rest of the known planets in the
Sol system. Only later did astronomers learn that
Pluto was tipped even moreso on its side and Venus
was knocked all the way around from our perspective.
With an axial tilt of almost 98 degrees (compare this
to Earth's 23.5 degree tilt), Uranus' poles spend roughly
half their time in the planet's 84-year solar orbit either
in constant darkness or light.
* The discovery of a ring system around Uranus in 1977
gave the first real evidence that, rather than being unique
to Saturn, ring systems around Jovian worlds are probably
common. Indeed, the next few years - thanks to the Voyager
probes - would show that these rings were indeed standard
features for all of the gas giant planets of our Sol system.
* The five known moons of Uranus were virtually unknown
little worlds, but after the Voyager probes' experiences
with the exciting satellites of Jupiter and Saturn from
1979 through 1981, it was assumed they too would hold
exciting new surprises for us.
* Voyager 2 was not meant to visit Uranus after Saturn,
having already come from a scaled-down version of the
Grand Tour of the outer planets. However, since Voyager 1
did make it to Saturn and perform a close examination of
its largest moon Titan, Voyager 2 was given the go-ahead
to Uranus and eventually Neptune in 1989 (it should be
noted that Voyager 2 also survived being shut off in 1981
to allegedly save some bucks by the Reagan Administration,
I kid you not). So with this rare bonus in hand, scientists
were most eager to get their first close-up views of this
bizarre alien world way out in the outer Sol system.
But fate likes to play games with human expectations, and
the Universe itself certainly does not cater to our wants
and desires.
The Voyager 2 mission to Uranus did go off as planned, but
its two main problems had nothing to do with the space
probe itself:
* Uranus itself did not turn out to be as "exciting" as the
other two previously explored Jovian worlds, Jupiter and
Saturn. The clouds were a bland and featureless shade of
blue. The rings were dark and thin. The moons did not
look much different from the other icy satellites of Jupiter
and especially Saturn. Miranda was the only real exception,
looking like a world that had been literally torn apart and
smashed back together, complete with 20-kilometer high sheer
ice cliffs.
One would think that exploring any new world for the first
time in what was (and still is) the early days of our testing
the waters of deep space would be exciting enough, but somehow
the public and press had gotten spoiled by the amazing wonders
at Jupiter and Saturn (not to mention many space-based science
fiction flicks), and Uranus was just not cutting the bill,
even if it was tipped on its side.
* The other deflecting event took place just four days
after Voyager 2's closest flyby: The Space Shuttle
Challenger 51-L mission ended tragically before it
could even get into Earth orbit, where a leak in a
solid rocket booster acted like a torch on the external
fuel tank and caused it to explode, turning the shuttle
into scrap metal and killing the seven astronauts onboard -
one of whom was going to be the first teacher in space.
This flight alone killed more astronauts than all previous
manned space tragedies combined: The lone cosmonaut of
Soyuz 1 in 1967 and the three cosmonauts of Soyuz 11 who
had just returned from a thirty-day stay on the Soviet
Salyut 1 space station in June of 1971 (the three astronauts
of the Apollo 1 crew were killed in a fire during a ground
test in 1967).
Needless to say, the press attention almost immediately
evaporated from the lone space robot and the dull world
it had been monitoring over two billion kilometers away
to Cape Canaveral and NASA and did not come back.
Despite all this negativity from the general human
perspective towards the Voyager 2 Uranus encounter,
many new and important items were learned about this
new world. Among them was the discovery of ten new
moons circling the planet, a powerful magnetic field
tipped sixty
