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The way to do it is to build something with sufficiently thick ablative shielding that the probe can survive long enough to get where you want to go. The idea is that you'd build something shaped like an Apollo commend module, but much bigger. If you'r plan is to get down to where the gas is so thick that the state diagram doesn't distinguish gas from liquid (I think that's what you've been saying), then a back of the envelope calculation says that you'd need to make the probe about 25 miles in diameter out of ceramic materials. The probe would need to be launched so that it enters the Jovian atmosphere pretty obliquely so that it can slow down with aerobraking slowly enough that it wouldn't lose structural integrity (the way the parts of SL9 did on their explosive way in). The Probe would eventually slow down to a few hundred miles per hour, and then start its trip almost straight down, with Jupiter's gravity doing the work of pulling it through the hot dense atmosphere. On the way down, the atoms in the outer layer would be liberated by the energy of getting rammed by the fast-moving molecules, atoms, and ions of the gas around it, and this would happen at an increasing rate as it descended. Also the descent would slow pretty rapidly as it got deeper in. Please note that my calculations used a lot of guesses and approximations, and the required diameter could be anywhere from 2 and a half miles to perhaps a thousand miles. The shielding would have to be solid, and housing a probe of about one cubic yard.
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Forming opinions as we speak |
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"Please note that my calculations used a lot of guesses and approximations, and the required diameter could be anywhere from 2 and a half miles to perhaps a thousand miles. The shielding would have to be solid, and housing a probe of about one cubic yard."
That's just to get the probe in there. Could the probe read anything with the shielding on? If it could - could it even get a message with it's readings out of the atmosphere and back to earth? I can think of a lot more interesting things to for the money. |
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If we could build something that could survive in a high pressure, high temperature environment like the Jovian atmosphere, then we would have some very impressive technology. Containing a mere plasma of low density, for instance, should be easy, so we would have cracked the fusion problem. We'd have abundant power; could we invert the containment?
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| Christopher Ferro |
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This message has been deleted by Christopher Ferro.
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I had hoped it was obvious that this would be an expensive and nearly pointless exercise.
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Is it possible to determine whether or not Jupiter has a rocky core? I was imagining using something akin to depth charges to measure speed of the resulting seismic waves.
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There is a growing tendancy to think of Man as a rational, thinking being, which is absurd.- Marvin the Martian. It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername. |
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