• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Flying Into / Through Gas Giants

That or you can think of Jupiter as the real Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave ;)
 
One partial solution is to have scram jets in your spacecraft. Since hydrogen is in the atmosphere you will have oxygen as the fuel. You would not want to penetrate deep into the atmosphere though or friction will be very powerful. Unless you invent frictionless surfaces.
 
Mr. Purple said:
So what's the higher hurdle?
Temperature or Pressure?
Click to expand...



I'd say temperature. You could deal with a heck of a lot of pressure if the spaceship was built as a solid object, with no voids, or any absolutely necessary voids filled with liquids. You wouldn't get the same crushing effects you would with something that human could sit in.

But the temperature would still melt, then vaporize it.
 
HansMustermann said:
Just to make it clear though, to even go as deep as the transition metallic hydrogen, it's estimated that you'd see a temperature of about 10,000 K and a pressure pressure of 200 GPa. That's about TWO MILLION atmospheres pressure, or about THIRTY MILLION pounds per square inch. By comparison, if you were to dive to 10,000m deep in the Mariana Trench, you'd only have to deal with 1000 atmospheres of pressure, and it's not something for cheap submarines. Now picture having to withstand 2000 times that. And at a temperature twice as high as the boiling point of Tungsten.
Click to expand...
No offense, but it seems to me like you're taking a question about aeroplane regimes of flight, and answering it by saying "you need to understand that your aeroplane can't fly through dirt".

I mean, there must be billions of cubic miles of Jovian atmosphere to fly through and explore, long before you ever get to the the metallic hydrogen.
 
rjh01 said:
One partial solution is to have scram jets in your spacecraft. Since hydrogen is in the atmosphere you will have oxygen as the fuel. You would not want to penetrate deep into the atmosphere though or friction will be very powerful. Unless you invent frictionless surfaces.
Click to expand...

Not sure if that makes it much better, though. On Earth you have plenty of oxygen around, and you'd have to carry the hydrogen which is pretty lightweight. On Jupiter you'd have plenty of hydrogen, but carry the oxygen which is quite a bit heavier. Basically you're still carrying the larger part of a big frikken rocket just to get out. Which you first have to put on several other big frikken rockets to get it out of Earth's gravity well.

Probably still not worth the exercise, IMHO.
 
theprestige said:
No offense, but it seems to me like you're taking a question about aeroplane regimes of flight, and answering it by saying "you need to understand that your aeroplane can't fly through dirt".

I mean, there must be billions of cubic miles of Jovian atmosphere to fly through and explore, long before you ever get to the the metallic hydrogen.
Click to expand...

1. I'm just answering the question in the OP. If it were a question about skirting the outer atmosphere, I'd answer it differently.

2. Not really. The metallic hydrogen there still isn't a solid. It's just so compressed and hot that it acts like a metal, in that basically the electrons can move around a lot more freely, so it's basically becoming a conductor. But otherwise that's still a part of those billions of cubic miles of Jovian atmosphere that you mention, so I fail to see why I'd exclude them from a question about flying right through.

The only part where it would require flying through dirt is when you reach the solid core. It was mentioned a bit later.

3. It's used there just as an arbitrary indication of depth. That's not even very deep inside the Jovian atmosphere in fact. I'm basically mentioning two depth points, one being at the very bottom, i.e., as deep as you can go before encountering something solid, and the other basically one point along the way where the properties of the atmosphere change.

ETA: just to make it clearer: other than the atmosphere becoming a conductor, nothing special happens at that point. As you go from the top to the bottom, the pressure gets increasingly higher and so does the temperature. If you stop just a bit before reaching that phase change, you're still in a very hot and very compressed gas, just a little bit less so. If you stop a bit lower than that, it'll just be a little hotter and more compressed. I mentioned that point as just a notch on an axis for reference, really.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom