Is It Challenging To Get To Neptune, the Farthest Planet?
Neptune is the farthest planet in the solar system. Since its discovery, only one spacecraft has reached this distant planet, making it the most unexplored planet of all, but why has it only been visited once? Is it because is too far from Earth, or is there something else preventing us from reaching Neptune?
The first approach
The only spacecraft to reach Neptune was Voyager 2 in 1989. This was the first time the human race had placed a spaceship near this planet. Although one hundred and forty-three years had passed since its discovery, we knew very little about this planet.
Neptune is the farthest of the four “giant planets”, is thirty times farther from the Sun than Earth, and takes 165 years to circle the Sun; since its discovery, Neptune has not yet given a complete turn to the Sun.
Its diameter is about four times larger than our planet’s, but it lacks a solid surface where we can walk, just like all other gaseous planets.
With the help of observations with telescopes from Earth, it was discovered that this planet has two moons; one of them is Triton, one of the most exciting objects in the Solar System since, according to its light spectra, it could contain large amounts of liquid water.
Although the telescopes of the time were very powerful, Neptune is so far away from Earth that it is impossible to observe its asteroid ring; because of this, the data collected in a few hours by Voyager 2 gave us more information about Neptune than about a century and a half of astronomical observations from Earth.
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