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What would happen if you tried to land on a gas giant?

https://www.popsci.com/science/can-we-land-on-jupiter-saturn/
41•Bluestein•4h ago

Comments

fmajid•2h ago
The same thing that would happen if you tried to land on a cloud.
tptacek•1h ago
Per the article, no.
rybosome•2h ago
I’ve wondered about this a lot.

More so the grim question: if you were in a typical space suit sitting in a ship just outside Jupiter, then propelled yourself towards the planet - what would kill you first?

Assume you are close enough that from the moment you are launched out, you are “in” the atmosphere at the outer edges. Also assume moving fast enough that the answer is not “dying from dehydration”.

I discussed a bit with GPT 4o and came to the conclusion that shear wind gusts of over 300mph in the upper atmosphere would probably do it. You’d hit that almost instantly, before high pressure, temperature or highly corrosive materials.

Bluestein•2h ago
> discussed a bit with GPT 4o

A fascinating, unexplored yet frequent use case, I am sure :)

(Positing these "what-ifs")

PS. On that note: All the recent space probes are yielding much interesting information on this.-

vinni2•2h ago
How can you be sure that what-if analysis by the LLMs are correct or plausible?
Bluestein•2h ago
As with anything else coming out of LLM-land, you can't.-
stavros•1h ago
How can you be sure with humans?
rybosome•55m ago
The first response definitely wasn’t. It laid out the hazards in great detail, then asserted the likelihood of making it implausibly far. I poked at that conclusion and it backed off until we arrived at shear winds in the outer edges, where I agreed with the analysis that this would be lethal.

It was a thought provoking conversation, regardless of whether it was absolutely accurate.

ChocolateGod•2h ago
> assume moving fast enough

then wouldn't the movement kill you?

ianburrell•2h ago
You would burn up just as you would on Earth. There is a steep increase in atmospheric density just as there is on Earth. The atmosphere doesn't extend much further than the sharp edge of visible atmosphere.

The Galileo probe needed a heat shield to survive dropping into atmosphere. The 225g deceleration would have killed any human. It is presumed to be destroyed from the temperature and pressure.

Although, you might die from the radiation first.

BSOhealth•2h ago
Sounds like the LLMs may be hiding something up there, likely a monolith of sorts?
Bluestein•1h ago
(This is were we find out an AI was running that weird room Bowman found himself in - the one with the lit floor ...)
celsius1414•1h ago
Depending on your path to get there, the Jovian system’s radiation might kill you before you hit the atmosphere.

‘Jupiter’s radiation belts – and how to survive them’: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

chasil•1h ago
"...might make it to a gas giant’s core. What it would find there in the alien murk is still unclear."

One conjecture is metallic hydrogen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen

TuringNYC•1h ago
I'm confused about this. The articles notes how hot the center of Jupiter would be "While our solar system’s gas giants are far from the sun, the core of a gas giant is likely to be incredibly hot–Jupiter’s is estimated at around 43,000 degrees Fahrenheit."

Yet this article notes liquid Hydrogen towards the core and ice in the core. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen

The triple point diagram https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydrogen-d_1419.html suggests temperatures in this range would not yield anything solid or liquid.

tux3•1h ago
You also need to consider pressure, not just temperature. The same wikipedia page is talking about dozens to hundreds of gigapascals of pressure.

If you look at your triple point graph, it stops several order of magnitude below.

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