Voyager 2 is a space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, as a part of the Voyager program. It was launched on a trajectory toward the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and enabled further encounters with the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to have visited either of the ice giant planets, and was the third of five spacecraft to achieve Solar escape velocity, which will allow it to leave the Solar System. It has been sending scientific data to Earth for 46 years, 8 months, 23 days, making it the oldest active space probe. Launched 16 days before its twin Voyager 1, the primary mission of the spacecraft was to study the outer planets and its extended mission is to study interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gaseous cyan-coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical phase of matter, which in astronomy is called 'ice' or volatiles. The planet's atmosphere has a complex layered cloud structure and has the lowest minimum temperature of 49 K out of all the Solar System's planets. It has a marked axial tilt of 82.23° with a retrograde rotation period of 17 hours and 14 minutes. This means that in an 84-Earth-year orbital period around the Sun, its poles get around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of continuous darkness.