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NASA plunged three spacecraft into gas giants. Two of them, Galileo and Cassini, were at the end of their missions when they encountered their loss in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. But the Galileo spacecraft arrived with a passenger – a probe designed to dive into the atmosphere of a gas giant.
NASA lost contact with the Galileo probe after about an hour, after reaching 93 miles (150 kilometers) in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Scientists are not sure how deep the probe will be until it is destroyed by high pressures and temperatures from Jupiter. But could we someday send a spacecraft deeper into a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn? Since these huge planets may not have a solid surface to crash into, could a spaceship pass through a gas giant?
According to Leigh Fletcher, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Leicester in the UK, the short answer is ‘no’. A spaceship could not survive a journey through a gas giant.
Related: How much would you weigh on other planets?
The problem with trying to fly through a gas giant is that “density, pressure and Temperature all of them increase to such huge levels as you step inside, ”Fletcher told Live Science. Near the center of Jupiter, gas normally hydrogen becomes a liquid metal, making this region “as exotic as the surface of the sun,” he continued.
To give an idea of the pressure near the center of Jupiter, consider the Marianne Trench to Earth, the deepest place in our oceans. At a depth of almost 11 km, pressures reach just over 1,000 bars (100,000 kilopascals), which would correspond to eight tons of pressure per square inch (703 kilograms per square meter). At sea level, you experience approximately 1 bar of pressure (100 kilopascals). Near the center of Jupiter, pressures reach megabars, or a million bars, Fletcher said. In addition to these enormous pressures, temperatures also reach tens of thousands of Kelvins, which equates to tens of thousands of degrees Celsius.
At this point, any spacecraft would not simply be crashed or melted – it would disintegrate entirely into its constituent. atoms, said Fletcher.
Here’s what a spacecraft might encounter on its journey to the center of Jupiter.
First, the ideal giant gas probe would have to be shaped like a ball, to improve aerodynamics and allow it to collapse as low as possible, Fletcher said. When the spacecraft began its descent, it would encounter clouds of wispy ammonia and potentially cross a blue sky, due to the same light scattering phenomenon that occurs in Earth’s atmosphere.
After passing through the “red brownish brown” clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide, the spacecraft would reach about 50 miles (80 km) in depth, a “turning” zone cumulonimbus clouds, possibly lit by massive thunderstorms, Fletcher said.
Much deeper than that, between 4,350 and 8,700 miles (7,000-14,000 kilometers), the spacecraft would encounter an atmosphere so hot that the atmosphere itself would glow, Fletcher said. This is where temperatures rise to tens of thousands of degrees Celsius and the pressure rises to megabars. And this is where the spaceship begins to disintegrate.
In this still mysterious region of the interior of Jupiter, hydrogen and helium become a fluid. From the Juno mission, which launched in 2011, scientists discovered that Jupiter does not have a solid core but rather a diffuse core of materials comprising nitrogen, carbon and even iron. By the time you get to that “fuzzy and mixed” core, “you are no more,” Fletcher said.
But Fletcher likes to be poetic about these things. Yes, Galileo, his probe, Cassini, and our hypothetical ball-shaped spacecraft all disintegrated into their constituent atoms as they plunged into their respective gas giants, but those atoms “will forever be part of these giant planets.” never really lost from a giant planet. “
Originally posted on Live Science.
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