Is it Challenging To Get To Jupiter? Why Have We Never Seen Its Interior?
Jupiter is the most visited gaseous planet of all; throughout the history of space exploration, it has been visited by nine spacecraft; however, so far, only one ship has managed to cross its dense atmosphere to observe its interior. Is it tough to land a spaceship on Jupiter? What’s inside the gas giant?
Ready? Let’s get started!
The problem with speed
Jupiter is the fifth closest planet to the sun, but it is not so complicated to get there despite being very far away. Because is the fact that it is the planet with the highest mass, its gravitational attraction force is vast, and thanks to that, the spaceships do not work hard once they enter their gravitational field, but this is also a problem.
Getting to Jupiter is relatively easy, but putting something into orbit around the giant planet is a more significant challenge.
In 1979, the Voyager space probe took 1546 days to reach Jupiter, but to get so far, the spacecraft had to acquire a very high speed; a ship traveling so fast cannot remain in orbit around any planet since it will follow its course.
To place a spacecraft in orbit around any celestial body, it must adjust its speed; it must not go too fast to escape the gravitational pull or too slow to be trapped by gravity and plunge into free fall towards the surface of the planet.
The Voyager probe was too fast to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity.
To get into orbit, it would have to make use of rockets to help it slow down slowly, but at that time, the Voyager probes did not have such rockets equipped.
Future missions that reached Jupiter did count on these rockets to slow down and enter orbit around the gas giant.
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