Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, has only been visited once by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which performed a flyby of the ice giant in 1986. It came within just tens of thousands of miles of the planet’s cloud tops, where it appeared as a surprisingly “drab” light-blue orb in the blackness of space, over a billion miles from Earth. Now, thanks to recent observations by NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope, we’re getting an unprecedented peek inside the layers of its upper atmosphere. The observatory’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument observed Uranus for almost a full rotation just over a year ago, showing how the planet’s ionosphere, a thin layer in the planet’s upper atmosphere that’s ionized by solar radiation, is interacting with its magnetic field. It’s the most detailed picture of the planet’s atmosphere yet, demonstrating where auroras form on its surface. It also sheds light on the planet’s unusually tilted magnetic field. Uranus is the …