- The best way to explore a new world is to land on it.
That's why humans have sent spacecraft
to the Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn's moon Titan, and more.
But there are a few places in the solar system
we will never understand as well as we'd like.
One of them is Jupiter.
Jupiter is made of mostly hydrogen and helium gas,
so trying to land on it would be like trying
to land on a cloud here on Earth.
There's no outer crust to break your fall on Jupiter,
just an endless stretch of atmosphere.
The big question then is,
could you fall through one end of Jupiter and out the other?
Turns out, you wouldn't even make it halfway.
(mysterious synth music)
First thing's first, Jupiter's atmosphere has no oxygen,
so make sure you bring plenty with you to breathe.
The next problem is the scorching temperatures,
so pack an air conditioner.
Now you're ready for a journey of epic proportions.
For scale, here's how many Earths
you could stack from Jupiter's center.
As you enter the top of the atmosphere,
you're traveling at 110,000 miles-per-hour
under the pull of Jupiter's gravity.
But brace yourself.
You'll quickly hit the denser atmosphere below,
which will hit you like a wall.
It won't be enough to stop you, though.
After about three minutes,
you'll reach the cloud tops 155 miles down.
Here, you'll experience the full brunt
of Jupiter's rotation.
Jupiter is actually the fastest rotating planet
in our solar system.
One day lasts about nine-and-a-half Earth hours.
This creates powerful winds that can whip around the planet
at more than 300 miles-per-hour.
About 75 miles below the clouds,
you reach the limit of human exploration.
Galileo probe made it this far
when it dove into Jupiter's atmosphere in 1995.
It only lasted 58 minutes before losing contact
and was eventually destroyed by the crushing pressure.
Down here, the pressure is nearly 100 times what it is
on Earth's surface and you won't be able to see anything,
so you'll have to rely on instruments
to explore your surroundings.
By 430 miles down, the pressure is 1,150 times higher.
You might be able to survive down here
if you were in a spacecraft built like
the Trieste submarine,
the deepest-diving submarine on Earth.
Any deeper and the pressure and the temperature
will be too great for the spacecraft to endure.
However, let's say that you could find a way
to descend even further.
You will uncover some of Jupiter's grandest mysteries.
But sadly, you'll have no way to tell anyone.
Jupiter's deep atmosphere absorbs radio waves,
so you'd be shut off from the outside world,
unable to communicate.
Once you've reached 2,500 miles down,
the temperature is 6,100 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's hot enough to melt tungsten,
the metal with the highest melting point in the universe.
At this point, you will have been falling
for at least 12 hours and you won't even be halfway through.
At 13,000 miles down,
you'll reach Jupiter's innermost layer.
Here, the pressure is two million times stronger
than that of Earth's surface
and the temperature is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
These conditions are so extreme that they change
the chemistry of hydrogen around you.
Hydrogen molecules are forced so close together
that their electrons break loose,
forming an unusual substance called metallic hydrogen.
Metallic hydrogen is highly reflective,
so if you tried using lights to see down there,
it would be impossible, and it's as dense as a rock.
So as you travel deeper,
the buoyancy force from the metallic hydrogen
counteracts gravity's downward pull.
Eventually, that buoyancy will shoot you back up
until gravity pulls you right back down,
sort of like a yo-yo, and when those two forces equal,
you'll be left free-floating in mid-Jupiter,
unable to move up or down and no way of escape.
Suffice it to say, trying to land on Jupiter is a bad idea.
We may never see what's beneath those majestic clouds.
But we can still study and admire
this mysterious planet from afar.