NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Join to View Uranus Simultaneously

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different perspectives. The results inform future projects to study things like the types of planets around other stars.

Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, to compare high-resolution images from Hubble to distant observations at leave New Horizons. This combined view will help scientists learn more about what to expect when they image planets around other stars with future telescopes.

“While we expected Uranus to appear differently at each observation point, we found that Uranus was actually darker than predicted in the New Horizons data. taken from different perspectives,” said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. New Horizons science team assistant.

Direct imaging of exoplanets is an important way to study their habitability, and provides new information about the origin and formation of our planets. Astronomers use direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, taking pictures of exoplanets is a very difficult process because they are so far away. Their images are only details, so they are not as detailed as the close-up views we have of the worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also image exoplanets directly “in partial phases,” when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.

Uranus was an ideal target as an experiment to understand the future prediction of exoplanets by other telescopes for several reasons. First, most known exoplanets are gas giants that are similar in nature. Also, during the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion kilometers, allowing its dawn moon to be studied – something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, New Horizons’ view of the planet was just a few pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.

On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit at a distance of 1.7 billion kilometers from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the solar side of the gaseous world.

“Uranus appears as a small speck in New Horizons observations, similar to the specks seen by exoplanets imaged directly from observatories such as the Webb or ground-based observatories,” he said. added Hasler. “Hubble provides a sense of what the atmosphere is doing as seen by New Horizons.”

The gas giant planets in our solar system have variable atmospheres with variable cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds of Uranus looked like from Hubble, the researchers are able to confirm what is being interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, Hubble and New Horizons observed that the brightness did not change as the planet rotated, indicating that the cloud layers did not change as the planet rotated.

However, the importance of New Horizons’ detection has to do with how the planet reflects light in a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories at or near Earth, can see. New Horizons has shown that exoplanets can be fainter than predicted at partial and high angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial angles.

NASA has two big prospects coming up in missions to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and the possibility of life.

“These important New Horizons studies of Uranus in a region not seen by any means add a wealth of new scientific knowledge and, like many other papers obtained from the mission, have shed new light on amazing in our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.

NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to launch in 2027, will use a coronagraph to suppress starlight to directly observe gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in the first phase of planning, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.

Hasler concluded: “Studying how well-known landmarks like Uranus appear in distant images can help us make better predictions as we prepare for these future missions.” “And that will be critical to our success.”

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made a historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humans their first close-up look at one of these planet-building planets and objects. Kuiper Belt, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now on its second extended mission, to study distant objects in the Kuiper Belt, identifying the outer worlds of the Sun, and making observations of the significance of the stars from its incomparable position in the far reaches of the planetary system.

The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, Boise, Idaho.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation for more than three decades and continues to make important discoveries that affect our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is an international collaboration project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports missions at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Center in Baltimore, Maryland, managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, manages Hubble’s scientific activities for NASA.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Foundation. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the work through Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payroll operations and meeting science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.