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Flying Into / Through Gas Giants

dogjones

Graduate Poster
dogjones
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Oct 3, 2005
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I was wondering what would have become of the asteroid that struck Jupiter in 2009. Does it now form part of Jupiter's rocky core? Or was it vaporised in the atmosphere? Which lead me to:

Could one theoretically fly a spaceship into Jupiter or Saturn, skim around their rocky cores and emerge from roughly the other side? Or would the gas be too dense to penetrate? What kind of pressures would you be dealing with? What material could survive said pressures? Could we design a probe to land on the rocky core?
 
Pretty much the answer is no to everything you asked

On Jupiter the pressure would increase till hydrogen would for a liquid, an ocean if you will. As the pressure increases, we would find the hydrogen being compressed to the point of behaving like a metal.

Beyond that - theory gets a little fuzzy. Needless to say, you are not going to be flying through either of these layers
 
Isn't the core of Jupiter metallic hydrogen because of the huge pressures? Unless we can make and maintain a spaceship in metallic hydrogen form then it's impossible. Isn't it?

ETA: MG beat me to it, but nice to know I wasn't too far wrong.
 
dogjones said:
I was wondering what would have become of the asteroid that struck Jupiter in 2009. Does it now form part of Jupiter's rocky core? Or was it vaporised in the atmosphere? Which lead me to:

Could one theoretically fly a spaceship into Jupiter or Saturn, skim around their rocky cores and emerge from roughly the other side? Or would the gas be too dense to penetrate? What kind of pressures would you be dealing with? What material could survive said pressures? Could we design a probe to land on the rocky core?
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Well considering that spacecraft are designed to work from about 1 atmosphere of pressure (about 14.7 PSI) to a vaccuum (about 0.0 PSI), then I do not expect that one could not penetrate too very far into a gas giant before some serious problems would develop.

Also, navigating in such an area would very tough (to put it mildily) due to the poor lighting, the poor visibility, and the many unknowns in such an enviroment.

However, NASA has done some preliminary designs of dropping probes into gas giants via parachute, and I expect that this is a much cheaper and safer approach than some sort of manned skimming exercise.
 
Crossbow said:
Well considering that spacecraft are designed to work from about 1 atmosphere of pressure (about 14.7 PSI) to a vaccuum (about 0.0 PSI), then I do not expect that one could not penetrate too very far into a gas giant before some serious problems would develop.
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I suspect dogjones was assuming that any spaceship designed to fly into Jupiter would have been designed with being able to withstand the pressure in mind. That part of the question really becomes "how much pressure is it possible to build a spaceship to withstand?"
 
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.

If you want to go all the way to the core, you'd face pressures of 3000 to 4500 gigapascals. I.e., 15 times higher than what I just described above. And temperatures of around 36,000K.
 
Sceptic Tank said:
I suspect dogjones was assuming that any spaceship designed to fly into Jupiter would have been designed with being able to withstand the pressure in mind. That part of the question really becomes "how much pressure is it possible to build a spaceship to withstand?"
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Zigactly. A space-submarine type thing.
 
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.
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Nothing even remotely conceivable could overcome this then?
 
dogjones said:
Nothing even remotely conceivable could overcome this then?
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Quite a few things are conceivable. I suppose you could build out of neutronium. First you'd have to find the neutronium, then learn to shape it. For manned you'd also need antigrav,good luck with that one. And so on, lots of concepts. Mostly blue sky dreaming on the back of beer coasters.
 
kleinjahr said:
Quite a few things are conceivable. I suppose you could build out of neutronium. First you'd have to find the neutronium, then learn to shape it. For manned you'd also need antigrav,good luck with that one. And so on, lots of concepts. Mostly blue sky dreaming on the back of beer coasters.
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I think Unobtainium could fit the bill. According to the movie "The Core", it gets stronger with increased pressure (and I always believe the science in science fiction :p )
 
Mr. Purple said:
So what's the higher hurdle?
Temperature or Pressure?
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Both the temperature and the pressure are simply far outside the capability of any conventional materials, so it's kind of moot. Sort of like arguing whether a garden snail would be worse as a pro-football quarterback or as an aerobatics pilot.

For the more exotic materials (e.g. neutronium) . . . I'm not sure that we really understand the engineering implications of those materials well enough to say whether the pressure or temperature would be worse.
 
Actually, I'd say you'd very soon have a problem much bigger than both pressure and temperature: getting out.

Look at how much fuel one needs to get out of Earth's gravity well. Jupiter is a much bigger gravity well, and all that mess of compressed gas will brake your craft pretty darn good. So whatever energy you had on your way in, you won't have on the way out.

So, barring fusion engines (which would have a lot of fuel around, in fact 99% of the planet's mass at that), if you do get in far enough, the only way from there is downwards.
 
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