What if you fell into Jupiter? A real probe did it. On 7 December 1995, NASA's Galileo probe hit Jupiter's atmosphere at about 47 km/s, braked at up to 230 times Earth's gravity, and sent back data for about an hour under its parachute. We ride its real descent: the fireball, the clouds, the wind, the heat and the pressure, until the signal ends.
0:00 Hitting Jupiter at 47 km/s
0:41 Two minutes of fire: how do you stop?
2:08 The parachute opens: what's down there?
3:42 The wind: where does it get its power?
4:55 Storms and lightning
5:58 Heat and pressure: what ends the ride?
7:29 What lies below the data
What this film does and does not claim: the ride is imagined; no person could survive it. The panel in the corner is rebuilt from the probe's archived data (NASA Planetary Data System, Galileo Probe Atmospheric Structure Instrument; the descent profile is fitted to the measurements) and sped up. The probe had no camera: the entry and descent scenes are artwork and visualisations, labelled on screen. The probe fell into a "hot spot", a dry clear patch covering less than 1% of Jupiter, so its results do not describe the whole planet. Mushballs are a hypothesis from Juno data, not a direct observation. What lies below the probe's data (liquid-like hydrogen, metallic hydrogen, a dilute core) comes from gravity measurements and models.
Sources
- NASA Planetary Data System, Galileo Probe ASI entry and descent data (Seiff et al., J. Geophys. Res. 103, 1998)
- NASA, Galileo probe science results release (Jan 1996); NASA Galileo mission pages
- Atkinson, Pollack & Seiff, "The Galileo Probe Doppler Wind Experiment", Nature (1997) / J. Geophys. Res. (1998)
- Wong et al., Icarus (2004), Galileo probe mass spectrometer; Showman & Ingersoll, Icarus (1998)
- Kaspi et al., Nature (2018), Jupiter's jet streams; NASA/JPL Juno releases (Great Red Spot depth 2017/2021; shallow lightning and mushballs, Aug 2020)
- NASA/Hubble, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts (July 1994); NASA, Galileo end of mission (21 Sep 2003)
- US Air Force, J. P. Stapp rocket-sled run (10 Dec 1954)
Visuals: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Ames, SwRI/MSSS (Juno), ESA/Hubble and partners, credited on screen. Thumbnail: illustration, not a real photo. Music and sound effects are original. Data panel and cards are original graphics.
Narration is a synthetic voice. Independent production, not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA.
If you could choose where the next probe falls, would you send it into another clear patch, or straight into a storm, and why? Tell us in the comments.
