NASA’s Voyager 2 made the first successful flyby of Uranus in 1986.
Voyager 2 passed Uranus on January 24, 1986, at a distance of about 81,500 kilometers from the planet’s cloud tops. It discovered new moons and rings, examined the atmosphere, and measured Uranus’s unusual magnetic environment.
The encounter was part of Voyager 2’s extended “Grand Tour” trajectory. After visiting Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1981, the spacecraft used Saturn’s gravity to continue toward Uranus and later Neptune. Its Neptune flyby in 1989 was also the first and, so far, only close encounter with that planet.
Voyager 1 could not follow the same route because its Saturn encounter sent it toward Titan and out of the planetary plane. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus at close range.