Using a high-temperature plasma tunnel, scientists discovered how it might be possible to dive deep into Uranus. Of course, we know it will smell bad; but there are other considerations when designing a probe that can withstand harsh conditions. So scientists modeled the atmospheric conditions of the solar system’s distant ice giant and its near-twin, Neptune, ahead of missions to the two planets someday.

“The challenge is that any probe is exposed to high pressures and temperatures and therefore needs a highly efficient thermal protection system to survive entry into the atmosphere for a useful period of time,” explains Louis Walpot, aerothermodynamics engineer from European space. Agency.

“To start developing such a system, we first need to adapt existing European test facilities to reproduce the atmospheric composition and velocity.”

Studies on our solar system are not over yet. We have studied Mars very well and the probes around Saturn and Jupiter, which have revolutionized our understanding of the gas giants. We sent a spacecraft to check Mercury and Venus. But the best view of Uranus and Neptune was a wave that passed by Voyager 2 in the 1980s.

So there’s a lot we don’t know about two mysterious exoplanets. Scientists at NASA and ESA are increasing the pressure to send a mission so we can start filling some of these glaring knowledge gaps.

The two ice giants are very similar, but there are some interesting differences, such as the difference in color tones due to the distribution of gases in their atmospheres. Additionally, their atmospheres are very different from those of Saturn and Jupiter, so the latter cannot be used as an analog to understand how these differences occurred.

One thing scientists want to do is send atmospheric probes, similar to those carried by NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, to study the ice giant’s atmosphere from the inside. But to take measurements and transmit data back to Earth, such probes will need to withstand the conditions in which they were sent. Such a probe would move at speeds of up to 23 kilometers (14.3 miles) per second, resulting in high temperatures as it falls into planets’ atmospheres.

An international team of scientists from Great Britain, the European Space Agency and Germany built a subscale entry probe similar to the Galileo probe and used two different instruments to replicate the conditions: the T6 Stalker Tunnel in Oxford, the Hypersonic Plasma Complex. Plasma Wind Tunnels of the High Enthalpy Flow Diagnostic Group of the University of Great Britain and the University of Stuttgart.

They created atmospheric counterparts using gas mixtures similar to those found on Neptune and Uranus and subjected their probes to equivalent velocities of up to 12 miles per second. The probe then measured the convective heat flux on its surface. “Tunnel [Stalker] Capable of measuring both convection and radiative heat flux and critically providing the flow rates required to recreate the entrance of an ice giant with traces of CH4[метану]”, Volpot explains.

“The tunnel itself operates with a free piston drive that can be coupled to several different components downstream to become a shock tube, a deflected shock tunnel, or an expansion tube. This adaptability extends to a wide range of applications, from testing subscale simulations to investigating the processes underlying high-speed flow.” It allows testing.”

Meanwhile, the plasma tunnel in Stuttgart is the only facility in the world that can create the conditions necessary to study the effects of ablation and pyrolysis on the spacecraft’s shield. Now that the experiments have been successfully conducted, researchers can use the information obtained to develop sensors to measure the atmospheres of ice giants that dive into the mysterious depths of Uranus. Source