{"id":200615,"date":"2024-12-02T09:25:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T15:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/mining-old-data-from-nasas-voyager-2-solves-several-uranus-mysteries"},"modified":"2024-12-02T09:25:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T15:25:00","slug":"mining-old-data-from-nasas-voyager-2-solves-several-uranus-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/mining-old-data-from-nasas-voyager-2-solves-several-uranus-mysteries","title":{"rendered":"Mining Old Data from NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 Solves Several Uranus Mysteries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mining-old-data-from-nasas-voyager-2-solves-several-uranus-mysteries2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists\u2019 first\u2014and, so far, only\u2014close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling new mysteries confronted scientists. The energized particles around the planet defied their understanding of how magnetic fields work to trap particle radiation, and Uranus earned a reputation as an outlier in our solar system.<\/p>\n<p>Now, new research analyzing the data collected during that flyby 38 years ago has found that the source of that particular mystery is a cosmic coincidence. It turns out that in the days just before Voyager 2\u2019s flyby, the planet had been affected by an unusual kind of space weather that squashed the planet\u2019s magnetic field, dramatically compressing Uranus\u2019s magnetosphere.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have observed a completely different magnetosphere at Uranus,\u201d said Jamie Jasinski of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of the new work published in Nature Astronomy. \u201cThe spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists\u2019 first\u2014and, so far, only\u2014close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling new mysteries confronted scientists. The energized particles around the planet defied their understanding of how magnetic fields work to trap particle radiation, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}