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What's that? Landing on Jupiter? Does Jupiter have land for you to climb?

As we said long ago in the Solar System series, for gaseous planets (including ice giants such as Uranus and Neptune), the definition of "gaseous planet" is not whether its interior is all gaseous. Whatever the planets, they basically have a solid core, but this obviously doesn't count as a planetary "land." So what "gaseous planet" means more is that it's hard to define exactly where the surface of a planet is.

Jupiter, for example, is the largest gaseous planet in the solar system. The part of Jupiter's atmosphere we can see spans more than five or six thousand kilometers.

Jupiter's atmosphere is thousands of kilometers below, where the clouds are thicker and thicker. And because the pressure rises, hydrogen begins to liquefy here, becoming a superfluid, so it's a gas-liquid mixture. Unlike liquid hydrogen, which we think of as liquid hydrogen, liquid hydrogen production on Earth usually takes place at extremely low temperatures. Inside Jupiter, this liquid hydrogen is relatively hot because of the high pressure.

Below these warm clouds of liquid and gas, the liquid fraction gets higher and higher, and eventually the entire space is filled with liquid material, all the way to the core. So Jupiter is, in a sense, a "liquid planet" rather than a "gaseous planet."

Jupiter's internal structure For such a planet, humans naturally have no way to actually land. But what happens if we fly our craft into the clouds and keep descending, forcing our way to the "landing"?

First of all, before you reach Jupiter, on your way to Jupiter, you will encounter the first fatal problem-radiation. This radiation is not emitted directly by Jupiter, but comes from solar radiation collected by Jupiter's magnetic field. Jupiter's magnetic field is much larger than Earth's, and even some of its moons are protected by its magnetic field. So you could be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away and begin to experience the lethal radiation from Jupiter's magnetic field. And as we get closer to Jupiter, the radiation dose gets stronger and stronger.

Jupiter's magnetic field But assuming your spacecraft can block this radiation, you're well above Jupiter. Jupiter's strong gravity forces the craft to deploy giant parachutes or to go full throttle to resist gravity. Otherwise, you and your ship will be attracted by Jupiter's gravity and free fall (vertically) at tens of kilometers per second. Freefall is not scary, but the scary thing is that when you enter Jupiter's atmosphere, the thick atmosphere there will immediately slow you down. At the same time, the air in front of you is rapidly compressed, resulting in temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees. In this case, the ship would become a dazzling fireball, piercing the sky.

Of course, your ship must be made of super-insulated materials, so heat resistance is not a problem. But your body faces another problem-gravity overload. Because at the height of your deceleration, you're probably going to be subjected to 230 Gs of gravity, which is no different from jumping from a dozen stories to concrete.

So, we assume that the spacecraft can provide sustained upward momentum all the time, slowly moving under the clouds. Slowly, you arrive at the equivalent of one standard atmosphere on Earth. In a sense, you can also think of yourself as "landing" on Jupiter's "surface" at this time. Of course, this "surface" still looks like it's in the clouds. You are surrounded by thick hydrogen gas, accompanied by a strong storm, the temperature is only about minus 100 degrees.

Jupiter Clouds (CG) As you continue to descend deeper into the clouds, you will feel the surrounding temperature slowly rise. At the same time, the increasing pressure causes ice crystals to begin to appear in the clouds and will be accompanied by strong winds of 200 meters per second blowing towards you. At this point you are no longer facing ice crystals, but real bullets. But for you, who have black technology, this is obviously not a problem, so you continue to descend.

By this time, the density of the surrounding "air" has become so high that the ship no longer needs as much lift, so you gradually reduce the engine output.

Slowly, you notice that the clouds around you no longer look like clouds, but become sticky fluids. At this moment, the spaceship was like a submarine, continuing to dive in this thick liquid. As the depth of the dive increases, the density of the liquid becomes greater and greater. Eventually you realize that even if you shut down the engine completely, the ship still can't dive, but floats here. Because the density of the surrounding fluid is already comparable to the density of the spacecraft.

So you turn around, restart the engine, and continue down.

At this moment, the surrounding temperature had already become extremely hot, even reaching tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. Not only that, but the pressure here is also amazing. The deepest ocean floor that humans can currently reach is almost 1000 atmospheres. And the pressure here is about two million standard atmospheres. Under such high temperature and pressure conditions, the nucleus of hydrogen has lost control of the electrons outside the nucleus, and those electrons bound in the atom have escaped to become free electrons. We know that this property of easily losing electrons is usually possessed by metallic elements, so we call such hydrogen "metallic hydrogen."

Metallic hydrogen (electrons outside the nucleus that break free from protons) Incidentally, the existence of metallic hydrogen was theoretically predicted as early as 1935. However, because the preparation conditions were so harsh, it was not until a few years ago that it was artificially produced.

Such rare substances, however, are not uncommon inside Jupiter, where there is a truly massive amount of "liquid" metallic hydrogen. If your ship is strong enough to withstand arbitrarily high pressures, then with the help of super-engine power, you can continue to dive in the sea of metallic hydrogen. Eventually, you're going to be in the 30,000-plus degrees Celsius and 30 million atmospheres. Most importantly, you finally touch solid "land." Yes, you've reached Jupiter's core at this point.

Jupiter's core is generally thought to be a dense mixture of elements with a mass roughly equivalent to 12 to 45 Earths. However, more specific information about the core is still unclear. So let this be the end of the journey.

Jupiter's Core (CG) Of course, the whole journey above is only imagined in our minds. What the truth is, we may not know for the foreseeable future. But we can't do it in person, but we can give it a try.

In 1995, a probe actually crashed into Jupiter under human control.

Galileo, dedicated to Jupiter exploration, was launched into space by the space shuttle Atlantis on October 18, 1989. Six years later, Galileo successfully docked in Jupiter's orbit and began orbiting Jupiter. On December 7, 1995, Galileo launched a probe designed to probe Jupiter's atmosphere.

Jupiter's atmospheric probe and Galileo fell into Jupiter's clouds with the probe, and the entire fall was recorded in real time. From the data sent back by the probe, we saw that the first thing it encountered was the tens of thousands of degrees of heat generated when it landed. However, with the help of heat shields and parachutes, the probe was able to continue deep into the clouds.

As the probe continued to descend, it reached 155 kilometers below the clouds, where the pressure was 23 times standard atmospheric pressure and the ambient temperature rose to 153 degrees Celsius. At this point, the detector's signal transmission device is no longer working, so after collecting data for nearly an hour, people will not know further about the detector. But what is certain is that the missing probe continues to fall. It will soon turn into steam and eventually become part of Jupiter.

Then in 2003, Galileo crashed into Jupiter to avoid a collision with Europa that would contaminate it, ending its 14-year mission. Since then, Juno, one of NASA's "New Frontier Projects," has taken over Galileo, which will help us uncover more secrets about Jupiter in the future.

Juno Jupiter Probe This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Linvo Says Universe (ID: linvo001), by Linvo

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