The atmosphere at Jupiter is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. This makes that gas giant like the Sun. The planet is as exotic as the Sun’s surface. It is covered in dense red, yellow, white, and brown clouds. This gives an illusion that Jupiter has stripes. In total, nine spacecraft have visited the planet. No mission has so far passed through the planet. According to NASA, it has plunged three spacecraft into gas planets. Two of them are Galileo and Cassini. Their plunge marked the end of their respective missions. Galileo’s mission ended in September 2003. The mission ended as the spacecraft plummeted into the gas giant’s atmosphere. The mission was launched in 1989. The mission studied Jupiter and its moons.
The Cassini spacecraft plunged into Saturn in 2017. Saturn is another gas giant and lies next to Jupiter. Galileo’s mission was, however, different. It arrived at Jupiter with a special passenger. The spacecraft carried a probe. The probe was designed to drop into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Notably, NASA’s contact with Galileo was lost just an hour after it reached around 93 miles into the atmosphere. The agency is not sure how deep the probe was able to travel before Jupiter’s high temperatures and pressures destroyed it. Scientists are also unaware of a spacecraft can survive through the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn to land or crash on a solid surface which the two gas giants may not have.
It is highly unlikely that a spacecraft remain intact during its passage through a Jupiter-like planet. The problem is that such a planet’s density, pressure, and temperature are very high and increase at different levels during the plunge. According to scientists, Jupiter’s center is filled with hydrogen which becomes a liquid metal. This makes the planet exotic just like the Sun. The third mission to Jupiter, Juno, is still active. Juno was launched in 2011. It entered the planet’s orbit in 2016. NASA has managed to figure out through Juno that the planet doesn’t have a solid core. Jupiter can be seen from Earth. It is the second brightest planet that s visible from Earth after Venus in the night.
