I’m interested in learning more about gas giants and read on wikipedia that a probe was shot off into Jupiter that took data and eventually was crushed and destoyed by the environment. Does anyone know what data it sent back? What did the probe look like? How long until failure? And most importantly, could a beefier probe make it on deeper, navigate around and come back out?
Jupiter is a very deep gravity well. It’d take a very substantial rocket to boost even a small probe out of it. By substantial, I mean something roughly the same size rocket as launched the probe from Earth. So in other words, no we can’t get a probe out of Jupiter.
As for going deeper, probably. Maneuvering around could be accomplished by putting some control surfaces (i.e. wings) on it. But it’d be constantly falling like a glider unless maybe we put a propeller or jet on it. Hey, that might work. Put a jet engine on it with a tank of oxygen as fuel. The oxy burns with the hydrogen in the atmosphere. Should work just fine, until it runs out of fuel.
Why we would want to do that, I don’t know. In terms of the size fo Jupiter, the probe couldn’t go very far before running out of fuel. So it’s not like it’s going to get some place significantly different from where it entered in the first place. Why waste the effort to send the jet and fuel when you could send more scientific experiments.
Thanks for the link. Is any of the raw data received from the probe published?
Actually, maybe this is a more direct link:
http://pds-atmospheres.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/gp_0001/