It has always been humanity’s dream to go to other planets like Mars and the gas giants, like Jupiter, beyond the asteroid belt. But it seems that it won’t be possible, at least not now, because of the massive obstacles such as the pressure, temperature and radiation in these planets.
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what’s experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun’s surface.
So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter’s depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right?
Well, there’s another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft’s electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn’t look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft.
Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet.
More about this over at Technology Review.
Do you think we’ll be able to overcome these obstacles in the future?
(Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)/ Wikimedia Commons)
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Maybe but the radiation that Jupiter puts off means it will be a lot of robots until we get shielding figured out to go there.
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