Planet 07 · Ice giant

Uranus

An ice giant rotating on its side.

Uranus is an ice giant with an extreme axial tilt, a blue-green methane atmosphere, dark rings, and seasons that last decades. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have seen it close up, which is scientifically rude but currently true.

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Uranus as seen by NASA's Voyager 2NASA/JPL

Radius: 25,362 km
Distance from Sun: 19.19 AU
Day: 17 hours · retrograde
Year: 84.1 Earth years
Axial tilt: 97.8°
Gravity: 0.89 g

World profile

Under the clouds.
Or under the dust.

Atmosphere

Mostly hydrogen and helium with methane plus traces of water and ammonia.

Surface

No solid surface; a deep fluid mixture of water, methane, and ammonia surrounds a small rocky core.

Temperature

Minimum about −371 °F (−224 °C)

Moons

A system including Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon

Composition

What Uranus is made of

At least 80% of the mass is a hot dense fluid of water, methane, and ammonia
A small rocky core reaching about 9,000 °F (4,982 °C)
Methane absorbs red light and gives the planet its blue-green color

Field notes

Three things worth remembering

01
Uranus rotates at nearly 90 degrees to its orbital plane, effectively rolling around the Sun.
02
Its magnetic field is sharply tilted and offset from the planet's center.
03
Some parts of its atmosphere reach 49 K, among the coldest temperatures measured on any planet.

Sourced image archive

Uranus gallery

Every image keeps its credit, capture date, description, and original source. Mission imagery links back into the same Andromeda mission catalog.

Voyager 2 full-disk image of pale blue-green Uranus against black space — Mission imagery
Uranus as seen by NASA's Voyager 2
Voyager 2 photographed Uranus from about 7.8 million miles (12.7 million kilometers), still humanity's only spacecraft close-up of the ice giant.
Credit
NASA/JPL
Captured
January 14, 1986
Open mission →View source ↗

11 sourced gallery items

Connected mission archive

Missions tied to Uranus

Flybys, orbiters, landers, atmospheric probes, rovers, launch missions, gravity assists, and system satellites are linked here when they exist in the Andromeda catalog.

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1 linked missions · showing 1–1

active

Deep space · Deep-space mission

Voyager 2

Outer planet probe.

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Launched20 August 1977, 14:29:44 UTC

Associations use destination records plus a curated cross-world manifest for flybys and gravity assists. Mission-name collisions such as Project Mercury and Saturn launch vehicles are deliberately kept with Earth unless they actually visited the planet. Technically obvious; historically necessary.

Primary facts source

NASA Science · Uranus facts ↗

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Under the clouds.Or under the dust.