It is the largest planet of our solar system, fairly easily identifiable with the naked eye in the night sky. Jupiter is a sparkling giant, mainly made up of hydrogen and heliumwhose mass alone represents more than twice that of all the other planets of our combined system.
Despite its colossal diameter (about 139,822 km, almost 11 times that of the earth), it does not have a soil itself, no crust or even real delimitation between its atmosphere and its interior. But what would happen if we tried to go down and land itas we would with a probe on the moon or on Mars?
A fatal dive in a surface world
As explained previously, Jupiter has no solid surface; What we see from space is the upper layer of its atmosphere. By entering it, We could not land: we would sink into it. Not in a soil, but in an increasingly dense environment, where gases become liquid under the effect of pressure.
From the first kilometers of descent, Conditions are already changing very quickly. About 1 bar (the terrestrial atmospheric pressure at sea level), the temperature is approximately -145 ° C. This pressure doubles every 50 to 100 km. Very quickly, the heat climbs: to 10 bars, it is already 20 ° C; at 100 bars, more than 300 ° C, etc. The pressure and temperature gradients are exponential.
Thick layers of clouds composed of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and water vapor, toxic and corrosive compounds, are omnipresent and would kill anyone who would breathe them.
The more we sink, the more the pressure and the temperature therefore reach extreme thresholds. At 1,000 bars, the temperature exceeds 1,000 ° C. No electronic alloy or component could work in such an environment. A probe, even designed to withstand extreme conditions, would be destroyed long before to reach the deep layers of the planet.
The more we sink into the interior of Jupiter, the more the physical conditions become difficult. Several thousand kilometers deep, the pressure reached the equivalent of a million terrestrial atmospheres. At this stage, hydrogen undergoes a change of state and is no longer a gas; It changes into liquid hydrogen.
If we continued to descend, the pressures would reach several million terrestrial atmospheres. Under these conditions, liquid hydrogen turns into a metallic hydrogen: a state of the material in which the atoms are so tight that the electrons become free, as in a metal. This conductive behavior explains the extraordinary power of the Jupiter magnetic field, one of the most intense in the solar system.
As simulated the video below from the YouTube Stargaze channel, The gravity on Jupiter is about 2.5 times stronger than on eartha factor that would strongly influence a theoretical fall in its atmosphere.
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So it is strictly impossible to “ask” on Jupiterwe would only sink, indefinitely, in an ever denser fluid. The question raised by this article supposes A reality that does not even exist : soil, or at least a contact interface. A conceptual impossibility, a physical nonsense that stems from our terrestrial projections on a celestial object with radically different properties. If ever a machine, or even a human, approached the planet, it would first be crushed by the pressure, then dissolved by the temperature, before being reduced to the plasma state in an ocean of metal hydrogen. Always want to put a foot ?
- It is impossible to land on Jupiter, since there are no soil, only layers of gas increasingly dense.
- Any descent attempt would be accompanied by an extreme rise in pressure and temperature, quickly lethal.
- Even with advanced technology, no machine could reach the heart of the planet intact.
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