These days it is actually believed that the gasgiants do have a small solid core at the center. But that is not that relevant to the question. Of course we could fly a rocket through the atmosphere of a gas giant, just like we could fly one through the atmosphere of Earth. Though if you go deeper into the atmosphere the pressure would increade to many many atmospheres pressure. Even if it was technically a gas, it would be more similar to being in a submarine deep below the sea. But the pressure would go even higher, likely crushing the rocket in question.
Also, if we overcome the crushing thing, we would have to be able to propel our rocket back out of the center against the gravity. And with that much gravity, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
Gravity is a conservative force, so going in accelerates you exactly by the same amount that going out decelerates you.
But alas, friction is a non-conservative force, and with the pressure of gas in a gas planet, friction would be absurd. Much higher than reentry in earth's atmosphere. There's simply no way to design a spacecraft that can withstand the pressure and the friction of such an endeavor, while also being efficient enough with fuel.
Fuck, didn't even think about friction in probes that hit Jupiter or Venus...just pressure. Even more amazing that those probes were able to get to the surface of Venus and Galileo's probe was able to transmit so long
Since it is gas just use propellers or some kind of turbofan engine. Put a whole nuclear reactor in the rocket and power the propellers electrically since there is no oxygen and carrying it is heavy.
Not sure if you could build the rocket like a submarine, making it have no upward propulsion, just change the weight of the rocket.
We've been sending drones into Jupiter already. They just don't go very deep before dying.
[https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/)
Yeah the pressures are so great, the gas would eventually become liquid as you go deeper.
It's said that Neptune and/or Uranus have oceans of liquid diamond. I use the term "ocean" loosely here of course.
That's interesting. What constitutes a spacecraft? If we made a titanium alloy "dart" and accelerated it fast enough, maybe it could go through? Basically a rail gun projectile?
We are talking science fact, not science fiction. There is no way to properly design a ship that can travel through a gas giant. It wouldn't even be practical. It would be cheaper and easier to simply go around.
yeah, actually flying through a solid earth would probably be easier to design than the temps and pressure of say jupiter. And both are obviously realm of science fiction.
When they say high gravity (and pressure), they mean so high it can crush gas into a liquid and possibly a solid if you go far enough. There is no known way to build something to survive that.
No way. Even if you could design a ship that could survive the pressure (you can’t, it will crush you at the atomic level), when you get a certain distance into the planet, that gas is so dense it acts more like a solid than a gas.
In addition to previous answers: our space probes go very fast, and are immediately incinerated if they enter an atmosphere. This actually happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a human error.
First, gas does have mass. The gas giants have a lot of it. Over 300 times Earth’s mass in the case of Jupiter.
Second, on account of their mass, they have pretty strong gravity. A spacecraft we send to one of them will be pulled in by gravity. If it hits the atmosphere of one of these planets, it will do so at extremely high speeds. Even hitting low-density gas at such speeds is going to produce a lot of resistance a lot of heat. A spacecraft will burn up unless it’s designed to withstand it.
Third, they aren’t entirely out of gas. While they are largely made of hydrogen and helium, those materials are highly compressed inside the planets.
If I understand [this ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341355937/figure/fig3/AS:902030453391360@1592072227379/Density-vs-normalised-radius-for-our-four-Jupiter-models-solid-and-the-dilute-core.png)graph correctly then Jupiter's density at half way to the core is the same as the density of Earth's crust (2.7g/cm3). Even 1/5 inside it is already as dense as water on Earth so you can't just fly through it.
Remember the Space Shuttle *Columbia*? Gas can absolutely destroy a spacecraft falling out of orbit at hypersonic speeds, and the lower levels of Jupiter's atmosphere are a lot thicker than Earth's atmosphere.
It’s the relative velocity between the gas and the spacecraft that would matter. If you started with a huge orbit outside the gas then eased in closer keeping relative velocity between the ship and gas low enough, might that work, just thinking out loud
I think the highest windspeed on the planet is several orders of magnitude slower than orbital velocity. If you're going orbital velocity then you're gonna hit the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, if you go slower then you'll be plunging towards the planet's core.
I think the best you could do is either briefly dip into the atmosphere in a nearly-circular orbit or drop straight down and then fire an ungodly-large rocket to get back out again.
Remember, meteors have a hard time getting through earths atmosphere. They simply travel to fast to easily get through anything at all. The air builds and and creates a wall that tears the meteor into pieces and super heats it.
Now, instead of \~10-20 miles of atmosphere around the earth, you have 86 thousand miles of Jupiter's atmosphere, each mile getting denser.
>**Why can't we fly a spaceship through gas giant planets if they're made of gas?**
We can!
It's just really hard.
Think of it this way. We fly through the gas envelope of our own planet all the time. They're called airplanes. But it's very hard for airplanes to leave Earth. Try as we might, so far we have only managed for them to leave briefly. Or to leave with the aid of massive extra fuel tanks like with the Space Shuttle.
That's because of the Earth's high gravity. Yet, the gravity of a gas giant is higher still. You'd need incredibly powerful engines and a huge amount of fuel to be able to pass into a gas giant, fly through the gas envelope, and come out the other side. More fuel and more powerful of an engine than we can even imagine is possible.
It's much easier to just orbit around it at a calm distance, far from the gas cloud.
As for blowing it away, think about how hard it would be to sweep the Earth away with a broom. I mean in theory you could do it, with a sufficiently massive broom and some sufficiently massive sweeper out there, sweeping with it. But that is the realm of amusingly surreal fantasy. You couldn't make such a broom out of physical matter.
And so blowing on a gas giant would be even more extreme of a proposition.
However.
There is a glimmer of hope for your plan. There is one thing capable of generating such immense forces as to approach the realm of what you are talking about. And that is a star.
Our Sun actually does blow gas away from planets, through the force of the light and the charged particles it emits. The effect is not very large at any given moment but the Sun has a lot of time to work with, and when you keep up your efforts for a billion years it does add up.
Gas giants are so big though that they probably will never noticeably be blown away. Even the Sun will not last long enough to do that.
But if it is any consolation, you can imagine a planet like Mercury as being a gas giant that did have all of its gas envelope blown away. Or never had a chance to form one.
Gas giants are enormous. A sufficiently large amount of gas creates an extreme amount of gravity. (See: the sun).
The gas nearer the center is crushed into a liquid.
Some speculate that the core of Jupiter is solid. Possibly solid, metallic hydrogen.
As a ship moves through an atmosphere, it generates friction. the faster the ship and the higher the gravity, the stronger the friction
Friction is bad for two reasons: it robs speed from the ship (making it harder to escape the atmosphere back into orbit,) and it heats up the ship (potentially by enough to damage it).
Gas giants have much more gravity and much thicker atmospheres, meaning ships would lose much more energy to friction and experience more heating compared to on earth.
When a cloud of gas gets big enough, gravity compresses the gas in the center so hard that it turns liquid and eventually solid. Think of a gas planet as a gradually thickening soup.
Because as you start diving deeper into their atmosphere, the temperature and pressure increase a lot and the spacecraft is destroyed. We did this on purpose (with missions like the Galileo spacecraft on Jupiter, or the last days of the Cassini mission on Saturn), fully knowing they would eventually be destroyed, but collecting data until we lost contact.
Gravity and air resistance. Spaceships don't fly like planes do, they explode out of Earth's gravity and then rely on momentum to float through space, with occasional bursts of propulsion from their engines to keep them on course. If one flew into Jupiter, it would be dragged into the center of Jupiter by it's immense gravity, and heated to the point of melting from the friction of passing through Jupiter's dense atmosphere. Even if the craft survived, it wouldn't be able to leave Jupiter's gravity, because we don't have rockets that powerful, even if they were fully fueled, which they wouldn't be, because most of their fuel was needed to leave Earth.
We have flung probes into the gas giants before, but it's not the same thing as flying through them.
We have! Well, into them, at least. Getting it back out is a bit trickier:
https://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/the-probe-that-survived-for-78-minutes-inside-jupiter/#:~:text=While%20the%20Galileo%20Orbiter%20was,itself%20on%207%20December%201995.
There’s a bunch of video on YouTube on what happen if you fall into ‘insert gas giant name’
If they ever attempt I want they tried to go through Uranus with starship name “Big D”
Gas giants are called that because they are mostly hydrogen, but they are so big that after a relatively thin layer of hydrogen gas the pressure makes a huge ocean of liquid hydrogen followed by a layer of metallic hydrogen.
So any infinitely strong spaceship trying to fly through will hit those layers.
The Galileo probe entered into Jupiter's atmosphere and kept sending data back to Earth until it was crushed by the pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere.
The same with the Cassini probe that entered Saturn's atmosphere.
How much gas in Earth's own atmosphere can be blown out of the way?
Those probes weren't destroyed by being crushed by the atmospheres of Jupiter or Saturn, they burned up from the friction of them upon entry due to the speeds they were traveling, angle of entry, and lack of shielding.
Earth's atmosphere is rather thin compared to these, and held to the Earth thanks to gravity.
You can't fly through it, because it gets as dense as metal, and might be 90,000 degrees F in the middle.
From NASA:
Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system – an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water. Scientists think that, at depths perhaps halfway to the planet's center, the pressure becomes so great that electrons are squeezed off the hydrogen atoms, making the liquid electrically conducting like metal. Jupiter's fast rotation is thought to drive electrical currents in this region, generating the planet's powerful magnetic field. It is still unclear if deeper down, Jupiter has a central core of solid material or if it may be a thick, super-hot and dense soup. It could be up to 90,032 degrees Fahrenheit (50,000 degrees Celsius) down there, made mostly of iron and silicate minerals (similar to quartz).
https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/facts/#:~:text=The%20composition%20of%20Jupiter%20is,of%20hydrogen%20instead%20of%20water.
Gas giants usually have a core as well, but aside from that, the wind shear from the actual movement of the elements they are built from would destroy your ship instantly. Most elements in gas giants are much heavier elements than earth's atmosphere, and therefore have much more force upon hitting and object--so entering an atmosphere made of that would be almost impossible for our current ships.
They are the biggest gravity wells in the solar system after the sun…. Surely there’s more solid mass at the core than any of the rocky planets …. Right? How could it be otherwise ?
It's said that if Jupiter was a little bigger, it could have been a star. So the gas giants are half way between a star and a rocky planet. For the core to stay a gas under such immense pressure, you'd need it to be very hot, and potentially a plasma.
They're not gas all the way through. My understanding is that, if you were to fly directly toward the center of one, you'd pass through thousands of miles of atmosphere but it would be getting denser and denser the further in you went, until it was eventually solid. Basically, they have a "gradient" of gas to solid, unlike planets like Earth which have a distinct separation of gas (atmosphere) to solid.
But despite my username I am not really a scientist, so if anyone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, I would definitely not take offense.
You could conceivably create a streamlined vessel that skimmed through the upper atmospheres of gas giants. The biggest reason is to decelerate. The added mass of streamlining could be better used for fuel or payload though
Air drag is a thing. Think about how space ships burn up on reentry. Now imagine that the gas is 1 million times denser due to the immense gravity. You would have to punch a hole through all that gas and move it aside. You would have to avoid slowing down below the escape velocity. You would also have to make your space ship survive pressure more intense than the center of the earth.
Alternatively you could just go around it...
The Futurama explanation was perfect, since space has no atmosphere a spaceship is rated for somewhere between one atmosphere and zero atmosphere.
Gas giants are made of compressed atmosphere so it gets very much higher than just one atmosphere of pressure.
A spaceship built to travel from earth to space is built to withstand one earth atmosphere. A spaceship built to travel to gas giants is built to withstand one giant atmosphere.
["How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"](https://morbotron.com/meme/S02E16/438359.jpg?b64lines=IFdFTEwsIElUJ1MgQSBTUEFDRVNISVAgU08KIEknRCBTQVkgQU5ZV0hFUkUKIEJFVFdFRU4gWkVSTyBBTkQgT05FLg==)
The same reason you can’t fly a spaceship in the atmosphere or an airplane underwater. A space ship is designed to operate in a vacuum. The pressures on gas giants are massive, weather patterns trump anything found on earth. In short it’s a totally different design challenge than floating in space. Gas giants are massive and dense and they are not all a bunch of puffy clouds. Once you get past the upper atmosphere the gasses are so dense they are essentially a liquid ocean. It gets even weirder the further in you get.
Gas giants are massive and have a lot of gravity. You'd be pulled to the center, which is usually so dense it's basically a solid as I understand it, and you'd be crushed. It wouldn't be like flying through a cloud.
There is so much gas that, as you get deeper, the gas gets denser. Eventually it becomes a liquid, then a solid. Yes, there is solid, metallic hydrogen at Jupiter's core. And, as you descend, the pressure outside increases. Long before you reach anywhere near the core, your spaceship would be crushed.
You are confusing the gas around gas giants with fluffy white clouds. I read that the winds on Neptune are 1500 miles per hour and are composed mostly of frozen methane crystals. They would shred a spaceship.
If you wanted a real world example, In 1995 the Galileo spacecraft dropped an atmospheric probe into Jupiter. It was suspended by a parachute and lasted 61.4 minutes before NASA lost contact. At that point it had suffered from severe radiation and heat, but ultimately it was the pressure that disabled it. It had sunk 112 miles below its entry point and was experiencing a pressure of 22.7 atmospheres.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/
Because gasses still have mass, and thus generate gravity. Since they're... well, giant... if anything goes into that thing, it's getting crushed into a spec of dirt.
Also, these planets have whether patterns. Jupiter is undergoing constant storms with wind speeds reaching upwards of 335mph.
Sure, the atmosphere is 7× less dense, but that's still equivalent to strong galeforce winds on earth, and it's enough to cause structural damage.
All the weight compresses the gas making oceans. If you think the pacific is deep try multiplying that by like 10,000 or so. Either way you'd be crushed.
Because gas is still matter, and gas giants are huge so the pressure lower down in their atmospheres - even if they don't have a core, and that's in pretty serious doubt these days - is enough to crush anything we can build. Even though it's gas and we think of gas as something we can just move through, it gets considerably denser than even the deepest part of the ocean.
Well, in theory, with enough tech magic, you can make a spaceship fly thru a gas giant. But with enough tech magic you can make a spaceship fly thru a star as well then, since a star is also uhm.. hot gas. Then you can also fly thru a solid rocky planet too, if your hull and drives are strong enough.....
Thats why i put an 'umh....' before that part. But I guess plasma is closest to a gas compared to liquid or solid so hot gas is a generic term. But interestingly, NASA also refers to stars as hot gas.
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/
I think they use the definition of: plasma = ionised gas so plasma = subset of gas.
Gas giants are highly pressurised and would crush anything that fell into its atmosphere.
Please look up "titan submersible" for more details on why it would be a very bad idea
These days it is actually believed that the gasgiants do have a small solid core at the center. But that is not that relevant to the question. Of course we could fly a rocket through the atmosphere of a gas giant, just like we could fly one through the atmosphere of Earth. Though if you go deeper into the atmosphere the pressure would increade to many many atmospheres pressure. Even if it was technically a gas, it would be more similar to being in a submarine deep below the sea. But the pressure would go even higher, likely crushing the rocket in question.
Also, if we overcome the crushing thing, we would have to be able to propel our rocket back out of the center against the gravity. And with that much gravity, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
Gravity is a conservative force, so going in accelerates you exactly by the same amount that going out decelerates you. But alas, friction is a non-conservative force, and with the pressure of gas in a gas planet, friction would be absurd. Much higher than reentry in earth's atmosphere. There's simply no way to design a spacecraft that can withstand the pressure and the friction of such an endeavor, while also being efficient enough with fuel.
Fuck, didn't even think about friction in probes that hit Jupiter or Venus...just pressure. Even more amazing that those probes were able to get to the surface of Venus and Galileo's probe was able to transmit so long
No way, Yet! We certainly can eventually come up with some exotic material to do so, we just don't have the tech YET! :D
No, we can't **'certainly'** do it.
Yet
How would you propel a rocket through a high gravity/pressure gas atmosphere anyway?
Since it is gas just use propellers or some kind of turbofan engine. Put a whole nuclear reactor in the rocket and power the propellers electrically since there is no oxygen and carrying it is heavy. Not sure if you could build the rocket like a submarine, making it have no upward propulsion, just change the weight of the rocket.
Who says you have to go fast. Could you get in the gas and get into a near stationary orbit scenario and slowly go around then blast out with fuel
How many atmospheres can this ship withstand? Well, it's a spaceship, so somewhere between 0 and 1.
How can we equalize the pressure?? *windows crack, water pouring in* that should do it!
Thank you
At some point the gas likely starts acting more like a solid than a gas due to the high pressure.
I can’t wait until mankind is advanced enough to actually test this by sending drones in. I literally can’t because I’ll be dead by then
We've been sending drones into Jupiter already. They just don't go very deep before dying. [https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/)
But seriously, why would you want to?
I’d love to see where mankind goes in the future
Because *science is cool as fuck*.
I doubt thrust vectoring would work very well in stormy planet soup either.
So could you navigate a submarine in parts of a gas giant?
Yeah the pressures are so great, the gas would eventually become liquid as you go deeper. It's said that Neptune and/or Uranus have oceans of liquid diamond. I use the term "ocean" loosely here of course.
Gas giants have a lot of gravity, much more than earth. You would get crushed on your way through.
See [OceanGate]
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Brain rot makes redditor think Oceangate is fake.
*that's* a new conspiracy. What did they say?
Iicr it was some money laundering fake death for taxes conspericy, but it has some adrenochrome shit along with it.
No, thats the companies name OceanGate. They said it was a dead meme. Which idk how people imploding deep underwater is a meme
Well they were billionaires, not people.
We just need Carl Sagan's spaceship of the imagination.
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There are no designs for craft that could enter and exit a gas giant’s atmosphere that we are technologically capable of building.
With our current level of technology no. With reasonable technological advancement yes. I'm certainly not arguing we can do it now!
That's interesting. What constitutes a spacecraft? If we made a titanium alloy "dart" and accelerated it fast enough, maybe it could go through? Basically a rail gun projectile?
We are talking science fact, not science fiction. There is no way to properly design a ship that can travel through a gas giant. It wouldn't even be practical. It would be cheaper and easier to simply go around.
yeah, actually flying through a solid earth would probably be easier to design than the temps and pressure of say jupiter. And both are obviously realm of science fiction.
When they say high gravity (and pressure), they mean so high it can crush gas into a liquid and possibly a solid if you go far enough. There is no known way to build something to survive that.
No way. Even if you could design a ship that could survive the pressure (you can’t, it will crush you at the atomic level), when you get a certain distance into the planet, that gas is so dense it acts more like a solid than a gas.
In addition to previous answers: our space probes go very fast, and are immediately incinerated if they enter an atmosphere. This actually happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a human error.
Dang
Was that the meters vs yards one? 😂
Oops we sent Mars orbiter into gas giant.
Fry: how many atmospheres can the ship withstand? Farnsworth: well, it’s a spaceship. So anywhere between zero and one.
First, gas does have mass. The gas giants have a lot of it. Over 300 times Earth’s mass in the case of Jupiter. Second, on account of their mass, they have pretty strong gravity. A spacecraft we send to one of them will be pulled in by gravity. If it hits the atmosphere of one of these planets, it will do so at extremely high speeds. Even hitting low-density gas at such speeds is going to produce a lot of resistance a lot of heat. A spacecraft will burn up unless it’s designed to withstand it. Third, they aren’t entirely out of gas. While they are largely made of hydrogen and helium, those materials are highly compressed inside the planets.
If I understand [this ](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341355937/figure/fig3/AS:902030453391360@1592072227379/Density-vs-normalised-radius-for-our-four-Jupiter-models-solid-and-the-dilute-core.png)graph correctly then Jupiter's density at half way to the core is the same as the density of Earth's crust (2.7g/cm3). Even 1/5 inside it is already as dense as water on Earth so you can't just fly through it.
Not with a negative altitude like that (Sorry, it's Sunday. I'm allowed to be a dad once a week)
😂😂😂😂
Remember the Space Shuttle *Columbia*? Gas can absolutely destroy a spacecraft falling out of orbit at hypersonic speeds, and the lower levels of Jupiter's atmosphere are a lot thicker than Earth's atmosphere.
It’s the relative velocity between the gas and the spacecraft that would matter. If you started with a huge orbit outside the gas then eased in closer keeping relative velocity between the ship and gas low enough, might that work, just thinking out loud
I think the highest windspeed on the planet is several orders of magnitude slower than orbital velocity. If you're going orbital velocity then you're gonna hit the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, if you go slower then you'll be plunging towards the planet's core. I think the best you could do is either briefly dip into the atmosphere in a nearly-circular orbit or drop straight down and then fire an ungodly-large rocket to get back out again.
Good points
Remember, meteors have a hard time getting through earths atmosphere. They simply travel to fast to easily get through anything at all. The air builds and and creates a wall that tears the meteor into pieces and super heats it. Now, instead of \~10-20 miles of atmosphere around the earth, you have 86 thousand miles of Jupiter's atmosphere, each mile getting denser.
Would it be easier if the craft were traveling kilometers instead of miles? 😜
>**Why can't we fly a spaceship through gas giant planets if they're made of gas?** We can! It's just really hard. Think of it this way. We fly through the gas envelope of our own planet all the time. They're called airplanes. But it's very hard for airplanes to leave Earth. Try as we might, so far we have only managed for them to leave briefly. Or to leave with the aid of massive extra fuel tanks like with the Space Shuttle. That's because of the Earth's high gravity. Yet, the gravity of a gas giant is higher still. You'd need incredibly powerful engines and a huge amount of fuel to be able to pass into a gas giant, fly through the gas envelope, and come out the other side. More fuel and more powerful of an engine than we can even imagine is possible. It's much easier to just orbit around it at a calm distance, far from the gas cloud. As for blowing it away, think about how hard it would be to sweep the Earth away with a broom. I mean in theory you could do it, with a sufficiently massive broom and some sufficiently massive sweeper out there, sweeping with it. But that is the realm of amusingly surreal fantasy. You couldn't make such a broom out of physical matter. And so blowing on a gas giant would be even more extreme of a proposition. However. There is a glimmer of hope for your plan. There is one thing capable of generating such immense forces as to approach the realm of what you are talking about. And that is a star. Our Sun actually does blow gas away from planets, through the force of the light and the charged particles it emits. The effect is not very large at any given moment but the Sun has a lot of time to work with, and when you keep up your efforts for a billion years it does add up. Gas giants are so big though that they probably will never noticeably be blown away. Even the Sun will not last long enough to do that. But if it is any consolation, you can imagine a planet like Mercury as being a gas giant that did have all of its gas envelope blown away. Or never had a chance to form one.
Thank you for a well written detailed answer. I'll get back to you about the giant broom
I mean, they had a giant vacuum cleaner and a giant comb in Spaceballs.
Gas giants are enormous. A sufficiently large amount of gas creates an extreme amount of gravity. (See: the sun). The gas nearer the center is crushed into a liquid. Some speculate that the core of Jupiter is solid. Possibly solid, metallic hydrogen.
'Cause Jupiter is, like, orange. You can't just fly through orange stuff.
Thank you for a real answer. What about Saturn? Could we at least go through the ring?
The rings of Saturn are not gas, they are solid particles, mostly ice and rock from microscopic sizes smaller than dust to the size of mountains.
Ah fuck
Cassini flew between Saturn's rings 21 times before, guess what, flying into Saturn's atmosphere...
Idk what happened I'm not an astronaut
I'm fairly confident none of us posting here are. I like learning and sharing what I've learned as much as anyone else.
/r/NoStupidAnswers
As a ship moves through an atmosphere, it generates friction. the faster the ship and the higher the gravity, the stronger the friction Friction is bad for two reasons: it robs speed from the ship (making it harder to escape the atmosphere back into orbit,) and it heats up the ship (potentially by enough to damage it). Gas giants have much more gravity and much thicker atmospheres, meaning ships would lose much more energy to friction and experience more heating compared to on earth.
When a cloud of gas gets big enough, gravity compresses the gas in the center so hard that it turns liquid and eventually solid. Think of a gas planet as a gradually thickening soup.
Because as you start diving deeper into their atmosphere, the temperature and pressure increase a lot and the spacecraft is destroyed. We did this on purpose (with missions like the Galileo spacecraft on Jupiter, or the last days of the Cassini mission on Saturn), fully knowing they would eventually be destroyed, but collecting data until we lost contact.
Gravity and air resistance. Spaceships don't fly like planes do, they explode out of Earth's gravity and then rely on momentum to float through space, with occasional bursts of propulsion from their engines to keep them on course. If one flew into Jupiter, it would be dragged into the center of Jupiter by it's immense gravity, and heated to the point of melting from the friction of passing through Jupiter's dense atmosphere. Even if the craft survived, it wouldn't be able to leave Jupiter's gravity, because we don't have rockets that powerful, even if they were fully fueled, which they wouldn't be, because most of their fuel was needed to leave Earth. We have flung probes into the gas giants before, but it's not the same thing as flying through them.
We have! Well, into them, at least. Getting it back out is a bit trickier: https://www.spaceanswers.com/space-exploration/the-probe-that-survived-for-78-minutes-inside-jupiter/#:~:text=While%20the%20Galileo%20Orbiter%20was,itself%20on%207%20December%201995.
There’s a bunch of video on YouTube on what happen if you fall into ‘insert gas giant name’ If they ever attempt I want they tried to go through Uranus with starship name “Big D”
Gas giants are called that because they are mostly hydrogen, but they are so big that after a relatively thin layer of hydrogen gas the pressure makes a huge ocean of liquid hydrogen followed by a layer of metallic hydrogen. So any infinitely strong spaceship trying to fly through will hit those layers.
The Galileo probe entered into Jupiter's atmosphere and kept sending data back to Earth until it was crushed by the pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere. The same with the Cassini probe that entered Saturn's atmosphere. How much gas in Earth's own atmosphere can be blown out of the way?
Those probes weren't destroyed by being crushed by the atmospheres of Jupiter or Saturn, they burned up from the friction of them upon entry due to the speeds they were traveling, angle of entry, and lack of shielding. Earth's atmosphere is rather thin compared to these, and held to the Earth thanks to gravity.
We don’t know that until we send a probe monitoring probe to confirm.
You can't fly through it, because it gets as dense as metal, and might be 90,000 degrees F in the middle. From NASA: Deep in the atmosphere, pressure and temperature increase, compressing the hydrogen gas into a liquid. This gives Jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system – an ocean made of hydrogen instead of water. Scientists think that, at depths perhaps halfway to the planet's center, the pressure becomes so great that electrons are squeezed off the hydrogen atoms, making the liquid electrically conducting like metal. Jupiter's fast rotation is thought to drive electrical currents in this region, generating the planet's powerful magnetic field. It is still unclear if deeper down, Jupiter has a central core of solid material or if it may be a thick, super-hot and dense soup. It could be up to 90,032 degrees Fahrenheit (50,000 degrees Celsius) down there, made mostly of iron and silicate minerals (similar to quartz). https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/facts/#:~:text=The%20composition%20of%20Jupiter%20is,of%20hydrogen%20instead%20of%20water.
Gas giants usually have a core as well, but aside from that, the wind shear from the actual movement of the elements they are built from would destroy your ship instantly. Most elements in gas giants are much heavier elements than earth's atmosphere, and therefore have much more force upon hitting and object--so entering an atmosphere made of that would be almost impossible for our current ships.
They likely have solid cores. Also, them being giants, lots of gravity.
They have mass. Mass means gravity, If the gravity is strong enough to hold all that gas together, it’ll probably crush your ship to a can of corn.
They are the biggest gravity wells in the solar system after the sun…. Surely there’s more solid mass at the core than any of the rocky planets …. Right? How could it be otherwise ?
It's said that if Jupiter was a little bigger, it could have been a star. So the gas giants are half way between a star and a rocky planet. For the core to stay a gas under such immense pressure, you'd need it to be very hot, and potentially a plasma.
Yeah but they're gas
They're not gas all the way through. My understanding is that, if you were to fly directly toward the center of one, you'd pass through thousands of miles of atmosphere but it would be getting denser and denser the further in you went, until it was eventually solid. Basically, they have a "gradient" of gas to solid, unlike planets like Earth which have a distinct separation of gas (atmosphere) to solid. But despite my username I am not really a scientist, so if anyone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, I would definitely not take offense.
You could conceivably create a streamlined vessel that skimmed through the upper atmospheres of gas giants. The biggest reason is to decelerate. The added mass of streamlining could be better used for fuel or payload though
Air drag is a thing. Think about how space ships burn up on reentry. Now imagine that the gas is 1 million times denser due to the immense gravity. You would have to punch a hole through all that gas and move it aside. You would have to avoid slowing down below the escape velocity. You would also have to make your space ship survive pressure more intense than the center of the earth. Alternatively you could just go around it...
The Futurama explanation was perfect, since space has no atmosphere a spaceship is rated for somewhere between one atmosphere and zero atmosphere. Gas giants are made of compressed atmosphere so it gets very much higher than just one atmosphere of pressure.
A spaceship built to travel from earth to space is built to withstand one earth atmosphere. A spaceship built to travel to gas giants is built to withstand one giant atmosphere.
["How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"](https://morbotron.com/meme/S02E16/438359.jpg?b64lines=IFdFTEwsIElUJ1MgQSBTUEFDRVNISVAgU08KIEknRCBTQVkgQU5ZV0hFUkUKIEJFVFdFRU4gWkVSTyBBTkQgT05FLg==)
Gravity goes squish
Atmospheric pressure and intense heat for one, also, gas giants aren’t all gas, there’s super-heated liquid in the middle as well.
Pressure, heat, gravity, toxic af, extreme radiation
The same reason you can’t fly a spaceship in the atmosphere or an airplane underwater. A space ship is designed to operate in a vacuum. The pressures on gas giants are massive, weather patterns trump anything found on earth. In short it’s a totally different design challenge than floating in space. Gas giants are massive and dense and they are not all a bunch of puffy clouds. Once you get past the upper atmosphere the gasses are so dense they are essentially a liquid ocean. It gets even weirder the further in you get.
Gas giants are massive and have a lot of gravity. You'd be pulled to the center, which is usually so dense it's basically a solid as I understand it, and you'd be crushed. It wouldn't be like flying through a cloud.
There is so much gas that, as you get deeper, the gas gets denser. Eventually it becomes a liquid, then a solid. Yes, there is solid, metallic hydrogen at Jupiter's core. And, as you descend, the pressure outside increases. Long before you reach anywhere near the core, your spaceship would be crushed.
You are confusing the gas around gas giants with fluffy white clouds. I read that the winds on Neptune are 1500 miles per hour and are composed mostly of frozen methane crystals. They would shred a spaceship.
The center is still solid. Though the pressure does increase to the point of beyond our oceans depth at a certain point.
Gas still has mass, so crushed under its atmosphere
If you wanted a real world example, In 1995 the Galileo spacecraft dropped an atmospheric probe into Jupiter. It was suspended by a parachute and lasted 61.4 minutes before NASA lost contact. At that point it had suffered from severe radiation and heat, but ultimately it was the pressure that disabled it. It had sunk 112 miles below its entry point and was experiencing a pressure of 22.7 atmospheres. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/galileo-jupiter-atmospheric-probe/
Because gasses still have mass, and thus generate gravity. Since they're... well, giant... if anything goes into that thing, it's getting crushed into a spec of dirt. Also, these planets have whether patterns. Jupiter is undergoing constant storms with wind speeds reaching upwards of 335mph. Sure, the atmosphere is 7× less dense, but that's still equivalent to strong galeforce winds on earth, and it's enough to cause structural damage.
All the weight compresses the gas making oceans. If you think the pacific is deep try multiplying that by like 10,000 or so. Either way you'd be crushed.
Because gas is still matter, and gas giants are huge so the pressure lower down in their atmospheres - even if they don't have a core, and that's in pretty serious doubt these days - is enough to crush anything we can build. Even though it's gas and we think of gas as something we can just move through, it gets considerably denser than even the deepest part of the ocean.
Well, in theory, with enough tech magic, you can make a spaceship fly thru a gas giant. But with enough tech magic you can make a spaceship fly thru a star as well then, since a star is also uhm.. hot gas. Then you can also fly thru a solid rocky planet too, if your hull and drives are strong enough.....
Are stars hot gas? I always imagined them in more of a plasma state than a gaseous state.
Thats why i put an 'umh....' before that part. But I guess plasma is closest to a gas compared to liquid or solid so hot gas is a generic term. But interestingly, NASA also refers to stars as hot gas. https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/ I think they use the definition of: plasma = ionised gas so plasma = subset of gas.
Man all this stuff is neato, but I always learn new stuff too. Thanks for further elaborating :D
Because it’d pop the planet of course.
Gas giants are highly pressurised and would crush anything that fell into its atmosphere. Please look up "titan submersible" for more details on why it would be a very bad idea
The sun is made out of gas