He was also kind enough to answer some of my questions about Jupiter. For example, you know the Great Red Spot? We don't know what all that red stuff is.Īuthor Michael Carroll has done a lot of thinking about planetary atmospheres, and his book Drifting on Alien Winds vividly describes of what it would be like to descend through Jupiter's clouds. Trying to figure out what Jupiter's clouds would look like from those pictures is like using this to reconstruct these.īy combining the pictures with other science data, we've been able to put together a pretty good idea of what Jupiter's atmosphere is like, but there are some pretty big questions still unanswered which make it hard to be too confident about what it would actually look like. At those resolutions, a huge Earth thunderstorm would appear as roughly one pixel. The best pictures we have of Jupiter's atmosphere are probably these carefully processed mosaics of the Great Red Spot, but they're still taken from very far away. If our submarine survived, what would we see? I mean, submarines don't usually have a lot of windows, but we at least have a periscope, right? We could, I guess, try to do the same thing with a submarine-by mounting a giant heat shield on the front-but it would probably qualify as the most Kerbal vehicle ever built.

The probe only sent back about half a megabyte of data to the Galileo orbiter, and had no camera, so we don't know what it saw. The Galileo probe survived by being a bullet with a big heat shield, and several inches of the shield were burned away before it finished slowing down and started falling vertically by parachute. Only the Galileo probe has survived a Jupiter atmospheric entry. There's no easy way to shed that speed other than slamming into the atmosphere and letting it slow you down, but the entry is about four times faster than the Space Shuttle or Apollo Earth reentries. Jupiter has a deep gravity well after falling down toward it from space, you're going very fast. If you took a submarine to Jupiter, it would burn up. One had no cameras, and one went in at night (and was being disposed of, so wasn't taking pictures anyway). We don't know! We've only flown spacecraft into a gas planet's atmosphere twice (both Jupiter). If you did fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, what would it actually look like? What would you see before you melted or burned up? I've done this with 1 x Mk1 Crew Cabin, I've not tried it with 2.What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions comes out 9/13. This would be much more stable during re-enty. In the future try putting the Mk1 Crew cabins above you command pod with an Aerodynamic Nose Cone on the top and possibly a heat shield under the command pod.This means that a lot of the time the side of the rocket, rather than the engine, is causing drag, which means that it slows faster and there is less chance of the engine blowing up from overheating which immediately flips the rocket. I've had success slowing down very aerodynamic rockets by spinning the rocket vertically (end over end).engine first), not explode from over heating and can hit terminal speed with enough dV to spare, you might be able to burn off the last of your fuel to slow the craft enough to allow the parachutes to deploy before dropping your engine. Do a very shallow entry (PE at 42km) and keep you engine attached (without a picture I'm guessing), that may make it more stable but you'll probably not slow down well.This is very aerodynamic and will not slow down well and not reach an appropriate speed to deploy any parachutes.ĭefinitely a +1 for a image of you vessel, preferably as it is before you do a reentry burn so we can see the engine / fuel situations. This will, as you have found out, flip to have the heavy command pod go first and the draggy crew cabins last. That's sort of your problem, if your last stage is what I think it is (command pod and 2 x Mk1 Crew Cabins) then that is never going to be aerodynamically stable going in tail first as the command pod is much heavier than the cabins (per unit volume).

Kerbal space program parachute burns