Wind tunnels show what a probe descending into the atmosphere of an ice giant may have to contend with
What would it be like to fall through the clouds of our Solar System’s ice giants, Uranus or Neptune? No one truly knows – but we W might be close to finding out. We have landed on, crashed into or descended into the clouds of all of the planets in the Solar System except for two: Uranus and Neptune. The farthest planets from the Sun, these worlds are still shrouded in a certain degree of mystery. This may soon change, however. Both NASA, in the 2023 to 2032 Planetary Sciences Decadal Survey, and the European Space Agency (ESA), in the Voyage 2050 program, have stated that a visit to these outer planets is a high priority.
To that end, simulated probes can help us understand what descending into the clouds of these planets might entail. As such, scientists recently simulated a probe descending into the atmosphere of the two planets. The tests took place at the hypersonic plasma T6
Stalker Tunnel at Oxford University and the University of Stuttgart’s High Enthalpy Flow Diagnostics Group’s plasma wind tunnels. The T6 Stalker Tunnel is the fastest wind tunnel in Europe, reaching test speeds of 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) per second. These tests simulated what a probe descending into the atmosphere of Uranus or Neptune would need to contend with, including heat fluxes and convective heating. Even though the atmospheres of these icy giants are very cold, a probe would heat up significantly from entry into the atmosphere. And the rate of such heating is orders of magnitude higher than anything the ESA, for instance, has had to deal with so far
