The Uranus Flagship: Investigating New Paradigms for Outer Solar System Exploration Workshop Summary Report

TL;DR

This white paper summarizes a workshop focused on exploring new paradigms for designing and enabling future outer solar system missions, particularly to Uranus, emphasizing practical approaches and early career involvement.

Contribution

It introduces innovative mission design strategies and lessons learned to facilitate more feasible and efficient outer planet exploration missions.

Findings

Community enthusiasm for Uranus mission is high.

Practical mission design approaches are essential for success.

Early career inclusion enhances mission development.

Abstract

This white paper is a summary of the Uranus Flagship Workshop that took place 21 to 23 May 2024 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Co-led by Goddard and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab conveners, we had a broad, international, Science Organizing Committee, and a largely early career Local Organizing Committee from APL and GSFC. From prior workshops, it was apparent that the community was wildly enthusiastic about starting a mission, but lacked focus on what was possible or where to begin. Thus, the purpose of our workshop was to discuss practical aspects of the next planetary flagship and how we can employ new paradigms to better enable robust outer planet exploration. To enable this goal, we introduced the community to the best practices and lessons learned from previous missions and NASA-commissioned studies, and discussed the challenges involved with a mission so far from the Earth/Sun. The underlying workshop purpose was to steward the community towards a more practical mission design approach that will enable the development of this mission, as well as future missions, on a shorter cadence by setting expectations and having difficult discussions early in development. Because of the time scales involved in this mission, special effort was made towards early career inclusion and participation.