Facts about Uranus and statistics table Fact One After Saturn , a space-craft would have to travel 1,500,000,000 kilometres to reach Uranus. This means the planet is almost twice the distance from the Sun than Saturn is. Fact Two Uranus orbits the Sun on its side. Its south pole is pointed towards Earth . The angle of the tilt of the axis of Uranus is 97 degrees. This is probably due to an object the size of Earth smashing into Uranus during its formation billions of years ago. Fact Three Voyager 2 was the first manmade object to reach Uranus. It had previously visited Jupiter and Saturn and had taken exciting close-up images of those two planets and their moons. However, when the first pictures of Uranus from Voyager 2 were received on Earth in January 1986, scientists were disappointed to see that it was a pale blue, featureless world. Six years of waiting and all they saw were images like the one on the left! Fact Four Uranus' pale blue colour is caused by the methane in its atmosphere which filters out red light. Fact Five If we were able to see Uranus' moons orbiting the planet, they would go over and under the planet like lights on a ferris wheel. Fact Six Like the other Gas Giants ( Jupiter , Saturn and Neptune ), Uranus has rings of ice and small rock particles. However, these rings are so faint, they are only visible for special scientific equipment. Fact