The chance of liquid oceans hiding beneath the surface of moons orbiting Uranus has enticed NASA to begin planning a new mission that will send a spacecraft to the ice giant.

The mission is still in the conceptual planning stage. If the mission moves forward, it would be only the second in history to visit Uranus, after Voyager 2 flew by in 1986. And if it finds liquid water oceans inside Uranus's moons, we might have the answer to a profound question to aid our search for life among the stars.

Doug Hemingway, a planetary scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who has developed an ocean-finding computer model for the Uranus mission, says finding liquid water oceans in Uranus's moons could mean that there are more worlds across our galaxy that hold a key ingredient for life than we know. "Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist," Hemingway said in a statement.