Exploring the Magnetosphere of an Ice Giant: Probing Uranus is No Laughing Matter
Our speaker is Professor Carol Paty. Dr Paty is a co-investigator on NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which launched in October last year and is on its way to Jupiter. She is also part of the team planning a mission to send a spacecraft to Uranus. In February 2024, she gave us an overview of the Europa Clipper mission and gave us a brief preview of a possible mission to Uranus. She'll give us a deeper dive into a Uranus mission and fill us in on exciting recent discoveries about this mysterious planet. Her description of her presentation is below. It will be a lot of fun and it would be great to have you join us!
The National Academies Decadal Survey for Planetary Science and Astrobiology ranked the Uranus Orbiter and Probe as the highest priority new flagship mission to initiate in the 2023-32 decade and recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have only heightened our curiosity about this enigmatic planet!
From the perspective of magnetospheric scientists, Uranus provides one of the most interesting natural laboratories for studying the influence of large obliquities, rapid rotation, highly asymmetric magnetic fields, and large Alfvénic and sonic Mach numbers on magnetospheric processes. Uranus is subjected to extreme seasonal variations resulting from the nearly 98° tilt of its rotation axis. The solar wind-magnetosphere interaction varies dramatically on diurnal timescales as well due to the apparent offset and tilt of the dipole field. With in situ observations at Uranus limited to a single encounter by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986, a growing number of analytical and numerical models have been put forward to characterize its magnetosphere and test hypothesis related to magnetospheric boundary layers, the solar wind interaction, the formation of the intense radiation belts, dynamo processes and interior structure, understanding charged particle precipitation, aurora, and energy deposition to the atmosphere, and quantifying potential plasma sources and the distribution of plasma observed. Despite these recent studies, many questions regarding the observations of Uranus’ unique magnetosphere remain unanswered. Here I'll discuss some key science objectives relevant for the upcoming flagship mission to Uranus. These objectives are centered in magnetospheric science, but cross key disciplines in planetary science, geophysics, and heliophysics.
About Professor Carol Paty
Dr. Paty is a planetary and space physicist specializing in studying magnetospheres of giant planets, moon-magnetosphere interactions, and icy moon interiors using a combination of simulations and spacecraft observations. She received her BA in Physics and Astronomy from Bryn Mawr College, and her PhD from the University of Washington in Earth and Space Science. She is a co-investigator on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and the JUICE mission and is actively developing new mission strategies to explore the Uranus system. Previously she worked on developing mission strategies to the Neptune-Triton system as part of the Trident Discovery mission team and the Neptune Odyssey Planetary Mission Concept Study. She is the current co-chair of the steering committee of the Outer Planets Assessment Group and recently worked on the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey.
Dr. Paty has been a Professor at the University of Oregon since 2018, prior to this position she spent 10 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences developing a planetary science focus and helped found the Center for Space Technology and Research which bridged space research interests between the College of Science and College of Engineering. Her postdoc was spent working with the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer team at the Southwest Research Institute.