Jupiter—a world of many tricks, few treats.
No one knows that better than Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute, and the lead scientist for NASA’s Juno mission.
“Jupiter is the monster in our backyard,” he says.
Yet every 53 days, the robotic Juno spacecraft flits by the beast, a mosquito buzzing an alien giant.
“We get really close,” Bolton says. “About 3,000 miles from the cloud tops.”
But they don’t stay long.
“We have to get in and out of there,” he says. “We’re trying to stay alive. The longer you’re near Jupiter, the more danger you’re in.”
NASA’s biggest fear for Juno—radiation.
“Very, very high energy particles surround Jupiter,” Bolton says. The planet’s radiation belts are “hundreds of thousands of times” stronger than Earth’s. Particles hitting the probe could “go right through” the craft. Pierce the wrong place, and the electronics might stop working.
Which is why Juno, in the midst of mapping the gargantuan world, goes from pole to pole in about two hours.
“We scream past Jupiter super-fast—more than 150,000 miles per hour,” he says. “Then we spend the next 50 days or so in a bigger orbit, licking our wounds.”
NASA provides Juno with protection, certainly. Titanium shields surround the electronics. “Huge, huge amounts of titanium,” Bolton says. “Sort of like the lead that protects Superman from kryptonite. We’re like an armored tank.”
Still, “some (radiation) gets through,” he says.
Even bits of space debris can be treacherous.
“Moving at that speed, a hard particle, even a grain of dust if it’s big enough, could drill a hole in the spacecraft,” says Bolton. “And anything bigger—big enough to hold in your hand—would be very, very damaging to us. Like a bullet.”
But aside from the titanium—and trying to steer away from high-traffic areas—there’s not much they can do.
“We cross our fingers each time we fly by and hope nothing goes wrong,” says Bolton.
“This is by far the most hazardous place in the solar system. Other than flying right into the Sun.”
Juno only orbits. It’s not landing. And for good reason.
On Jupiter, there’s nowhere to land.
“It’s a gigantic ball of gas,” says Bolton.
Get past the storms on steroids—like the Great Red Spot, with winds of about 400 miles per hour—and there’s no surface, at least “not the way we think of a surface, with hard ground that you can walk on.”
Here is where Jupiter defies description. The data from Juno suggests this:
Rather than a surface, “transitions” emerge, maybe many of them, says Bolton. Descend deep into Jupiter—and you can’t, the atmospheric pressure would tear you to pieces—but if you could, “strange material,” not found on Earth, would appear. Gases liquify, sort of; the hydrogen, for instance, “starts to behave like metallic hydrogen,” he says. Beneath the transitions might be “a fuzzy diffuse core.” Perhaps a compact, rocky-like core, “under incredible pressure,” is at the very center of Jupiter.
“This is one of the things Juno is searching for,” says Bolton.
Forbidding as it is, researchers still wonder if life could somehow exist on Jupiter—in the clouds, or possibly deep down.
Finding extraterrestrials is not part of Juno’s mission. “But you could have life,” speculates Bolton. “It wouldn’t be like us. We might not even recognize it as life. We can’t exist there, but that doesn’t mean another kind of life form couldn’t.”
What is certain: Jupiter’s ferocious interior holds clues to something just as stunning—the ancient origins of the solar system.
“Jupiter was probably the first planet built,” says Bolton. “It can tell us how the planets got made. It’s not going to give you all the answers, but it may give you that very first step.” Discovering how the Earth got here—now that’s a treat.
