Uranus: Why we should visit the most unloved planet (BBC)
Richard Hollingham
Uranus has always been left out when it comes to missions to our near neighbours. But now there are serious attempts to visit this toxic gas giant, writes Richard Hollingham.
The butt (snigger) of countless jokes, Uranus is almost certainly the most unloved planet in our solar system. It always seems to get overlooked when the mission invitations go out.
Spacecraft have been sent to Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter. There is even one on its way to non-planet Pluto. Uranus has only ever qualified for the planetary equivalent of a presidential brush-by, when Voyager 2 sped past on its way to the edge of the solar system in 1986.
‘Oddball’
But Uranus (pronounced “yur-an-us” in polite astronomical circles) does not deserve its dull, or comic, reputation. In fact it is one of the most interesting, exciting and downright weird planets we know of.
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Fletcher is part of an international team that believes Uranus has been neglected for too long. This group of space scientists and engineers from Europe, the United States and several other nations, including Japan, is working on a $600m mission proposal for the European Space Agency (ESA) with the aim of sending out a space probe, within the next 10 years, to discover why Uranus is so odd. The mission will investigate the atmosphere, magnetic field and capture detailed images of this strange world.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140822-the-mission-to-an-un-loved-planet
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“Think of Uranus as the missing link,” says Fletcher. “A mission that was able to probe the internal structure of the planet, to sniff out the atmospheric composition and understand how the atmosphere evolves would allow us to put together the puzzle about how planets form.”
The methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide must be mighty acrid to the senses. P U! 
