Geoffrey de Vere
ᴛₕₑ ʜᵒᶰ Sir Wynfried Geoffrey Dymer de Vere, 2ᴰ Bᴛ
- Joined
- 5 December 2025
- Messages
- 34
- Reaction score
- 37
Voyager 2's mission was made possible because of a once-in-175-years alignment of the Outer Planets that made it possible to send a spacecraft on a continuous gravity-assist course that allowed it to be swung by Jupiter into Saturn, and thence into Uranus and Neptune.
Suppose that alignment was never discovered or never acted upon. How could NASA explore Uranus and Neptune? My theory is that they'd probably be left unexplored until around the 1990s or 2000s, when individual probes could be flung into Uranian and Neptunian systems by way of Jupiter (like New Horizons) or some other complicated gravity-assist course like with Cassini and Huygens.
Suppose that alignment was never discovered or never acted upon. How could NASA explore Uranus and Neptune? My theory is that they'd probably be left unexplored until around the 1990s or 2000s, when individual probes could be flung into Uranian and Neptunian systems by way of Jupiter (like New Horizons) or some other complicated gravity-assist course like with Cassini and Huygens.