Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A lone spacecraft's visit to Uranus may have left us with the complete wrong impression of the ice giant for nearly 40 years. The ...

Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, ...

Uranus wasn't ready for its closeup 38 years ago. I speak of the 7th planet from the Sun, and third largest in our solar system, which received a flyby — 50,000 miles above the planet — from the ...

Scientists may have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding Uranus' extraordinarily strong radiation belt. A new analysis of Voyager 2 data suggests that a temporary space weather event may have ...

Some of Uranus’ apparent oddities might be due to bad timing. “We just caught it at this freak moment in time,” says Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in ...

Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. A flyby of Uranus in 1986 is where we gathered much of our knowledge about the distant ice giant, but new research has ...

NASA's Voyager mission beamed back unprecedented views. It also sent back some mysteries. One of these came in 1986, when the Voyager 2 probe — one of a duo of Voyager craft sent into deep space — ...

Voyager 2 launched in 1977 during a rare planetary alignment that happens only once every 176 years. Using gravity assists ...

A lone spacecraft's visit to Uranus may have left us with the complete wrong impression of the ice giant for nearly 40 years. The strange, sideways-rotating planet – the third largest in our solar ...

Much of our understanding of Uranus comes from Voyager 2's flyby, which to date remains the only time a spacecraft has visited the planet. Voyager 2's data on the magnetosphere surrounding Uranus has ...