Can a spacecraft survive passing through Jupiter? The short answer is no. Deep within this gas giant, temperatures and pressures exceed the limits of any human-engineered material.
Jupiter, our solar system's largest planet, consists primarily of hydrogen (about 90% of its atmosphere) and helium (about 10%). Trace amounts of water vapor, methane, hydrogen sulfide, neon, oxygen, phosphine, carbon, ethane, sulfur, and ammonia are also present. While multiple probes have orbited Jupiter, only NASA's Galileo probe entered its atmosphere, descending 150 kilometers before contact was lost after roughly an hour—likely surviving just a few hours at most.
Could a future mission probe deeper, even crossing the planet entirely? According to planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester, UK, the answer remains a firm no.
For context, Earth's Mariana Trench—the ocean's deepest point—experiences pressures exceeding 1,000 bar, or over one ton per square centimeter. At Jupiter's center, pressures soar to several million bar, with temperatures reaching tens of thousands of degrees Celsius.
"At these depths, any spacecraft wouldn't just be crushed or melted—it would disintegrate entirely into its constituent atoms," Fletcher explains.
No probe could endure such conditions to cross Jupiter, especially confronting its dense core. NASA's Juno mission confirmed this core's existence by analyzing gravitational effects on the spacecraft, mapping the planet's internal mass distribution.
The core's exact nature remains elusive amid thick clouds, but models suggest a rocky center enveloped in melted ice, metallic hydrogen, and molecular hydrogen layers—with a mass of 12 to 45 Earth masses.
