Voyager

He had been cagey all along about what he had in mind, other than to include the moon landing and the Golden Record, the disc that astronomer and media personality Carl Sagan made for Voyager 1 and 2.

The scientists who studied Miranda also used Voyager 2 to discern features they may have otherwise missed.

“If we had arrived a week earlier with Voyager 2, then the spacecraft would have made completely different measurements, and our discoveries would have been very different. Voyager 2 arrived at just the wrong time!”

Based on the data, also acquired from Voyager 2, researchers led by a University of California Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science speculates that the surface of Uranus is layered and, like oil and water, the two layers never mix.

The Miranda paper relied on images taken from the Voyager 2 probe, the one and only spacecraft to visit Uranus, to reach these conclusions.