The Comparative Exploration of the Ice Giant Planets with Twin Spacecraft: Unveiling the History of our Solar System

Abstract

In the course of the selection of the scientific themes for the second and third L-class missions of the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program of the European Space Agency, the exploration of the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune was defined "a timely milestone, fully appropriate for an L class mission". Among the proposed scientific themes, we presented the scientific case of exploring both planets and their satellites in the framework of a single L-class mission and proposed a mission scenario that could allow to achieve this result. In this work we present an updated and more complete discussion of the scientific rationale and of the mission concept for a comparative exploration of the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune and of their satellite systems with twin spacecraft. The first goal of comparatively studying these two similar yet extremely different systems is to shed new light on the ancient past of the Solar System and on the processes that shaped its formation and evolution. This, in turn, would reveal whether the Solar System and the very diverse extrasolar systems discovered so far all share a common origin or if different environments and mechanisms were responsible for their formation. A space mission to the ice giants would also open up the possibility to use Uranus and Neptune as templates in the study of one of the most abundant type of extrasolar planets in the galaxy. Finally, such a mission would allow a detailed study of the interplanetary and gravitational environments at a range of distances from the Sun poorly covered by direct exploration, improving the constraints on the fundamental theories of gravitation and on the behaviour of the solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field.

29 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication on the special issue "The outer Solar System X" of the journal Planetary and Space Science. This article presents an updated and expanded discussion of the white paper "The ODINUS Mission Concept" (arXiv:1402.2472) submitted in response to the ESA call for ideas for the scientific themes of the future L2 and L3 space missions

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• One EURO for Uranus: the Elliptical Uranian Relativity Orbiter mission
• Outer Solar System Exploration: A Compelling and Unified Dual Mission Decadal Strategy for Exploring Uranus, Neptune, Triton, Dwarf Planets, and Small KBOs and Centaurs
• Is the recently proposed Mars-sized perturber at $65-80\text{AU}$ ruled out by the Cassini ranging data?