Would it be possible to explore any of the gas giants by some sort of manned outpost that floats above the clouds...

That picture is really cool but also 100% NOT how it really is.

>manned outpost that floats above the clouds
>manned outpost
>manned

why?

How is it really then?

I don't know how thick, brown and flat the cloud cover is, but I can assure you it's not that much.
Also the sky certainly isn't blue with high white clouds, such strong sunlight. And no moon would look so big.

I think you'd need to ride a delicate balance between atmospheric pressure and temperature. Too high in the clouds and you'll freeze to death. Too low and you're nice and warm but you'll be crushed. Go way too low and you melt. There might be a habitable zone or there might not.

Windy and dark except for the monstrous lightning strikes.

don't think Neptune is a possibility what with the chaotic weather systems

Damn, Uranus sounds like a nice place.
I mean, other than the crushing pressure and cold.

There apparently is a hard surface of solid elemental hydrogen, probably a super-heated then condensed solid rock core below that.

I think I'd rather fly in a balloon in perpetual orbit rather than a plane or helicopter.

If the engines failed that would be a HELL of a ride down.

Is it possible to build a balloon that just "orbits" super high in an atmosphere long term? I don't think we've done it on Earth which is why I'm asking.

I heard it doesn't count because there's no break in layers, as you go down the material just steadily gets thicker until it becomes solid.

I wonder if we'll ever know for sure.

I feel sorry for that future probe.

Galileo's probe had a pretty rough time, yeah.

Fucking christ that's roughly 350 pounds per square in. just below the first cloud level.

>Theoretical analysis indicates that the parachute would have melted first, roughly 105 minutes after entry, then the aluminum components after another 40 minutes of free fall through a sea of supercritical fluid hydrogen. The titanium structure would have lasted around 6.5 hours more before disintegrating. Due to the high pressure, the droplets of metals from the probe would finally have vaporized once their critical temperature had been reached, and mixed with Jupiter's liquid metallic hydrogen interior. The probe was expected to have completely vaporized 10 hours after its atmospheric entry.

>The probe entered Jupiter's atmosphere at 22:04 UTC. Before the atmospheric entry, the probe discovered a new radiation belt 31,000 miles (50,000 km) above Jupiter's cloud tops. The atmosphere through which it subsequently descended was found to be much denser and hotter than expected. Jupiter was also found to have only half the amount of helium expected and the data did not support the three-layered cloud structure theory. Only one significant cloud layer was measured by the probe, but with many indications of smaller areas of increased particle densities along all of the trajectory. The probe detected less lightning, less water, but more winds than expected. The atmosphere was more turbulent and the winds a lot stronger than the expected maximum of 350 kilometers per hour (220 mph). It required a laborious analysis of the initial wind data from the probe to determine the actual measured wind speeds. The results eventually showed that wind speeds in the outermost layers were 290-360 kilometers per hour (80-100 m/s), in agreement with previous measurements from afar, but that winds increased dramatically at pressure levels of 1-4 bars, then remaining consistently high at around 610 kilometers per hour (170 m/s). No solid surface was detected during the 156 kilometres (97 mi) downward journey.

I can't imagine falling in a parachute for a fucking hour. Damn.

I'd like to see a cross section of how deep the probe actually got.

That's a good point. The descent summary in the pic is really neat.

>While the Galileo Orbiter was designed to orbit and study Jupiter and its moons, the Galileo Probe was released near Jupiter and was sent into the gas giant itself on 7 December 1995. It entered the atmosphere of Jupiter at 30 miles per second (46km per second), the highest impact speed ever achieved by a man-made object. Amazingly, Jupiter’s dense atmosphere slowed the craft to 0.07 miles per second (0.12km per second) in just four minutes.

>The probe’s heat shield, made of carbon phenolic, was able to withstand the 15,500°C ball of plasma caused by this sudden deceleration, producing light brighter than the Sun’s surface. It remained active for about 78 minutes as it passed through Jupiter’s atmosphere, losing more than half of its mass in the process before being crushed by the huge pressure.

It was like diving to the challenger deep and getting 24m below the sea level.

>It was like diving to the challenger deep and getting 24m below the sea level.
that's what I was thinking. Fall for an hour and barely scratch the surface.

>>manned
>
>why?
Because there's no substitute for being there yourself. No number of robots, regardless of however advanced they may be, is an adequate substitute. Humans staying confined to Earth is like apes choosing to keep themselves confined to a small cage. A very nice, comfortable cage, but a cage nonetheless. It limits our potential and kills our dreams. Humanity simply has to get out there, no two ways around it.

>> like diving to challenger deep
The pressure measure at max depth was 24 bar. The pressure at challenger deep is 1110 bar

Interestingly, going deeper is limited by telecommunications and not temperature or pressure. We could get a probe to 200 bar, the issue is that the mothership would be at a bad angle and the atmospheric attenuation would be really bad.

With multiple orbiting receivers we could probably do it, it's just expensive

With sufficiently advanced VR, you can't tell the difference.

If you disagree, may I interest you in a one way trip to the sun?

>With sufficiently advanced VR, you can't tell the difference.
Yes you can because you know it's not real.

But it is real. With sufficiently low lag, a teleoperated robot is as good as actually being there.

There is no point to being there other than romanticism. Having a human physically on jupiter buys us nothing in terms of science.

VRfags fuck off

For environments where it's too dangerous/expensive/impractical to have a human there, VR is a great alternative, but in cases where it's possible to get someone to the location, that's going to be the ideal option. Call it romantic, but physically going somewhere is all part of the human spirit to explore, to see and learn new things. That sensation of discovering something with your own eyes and senses can't easily be replaced.

It's dangerous, impractical, and expensive to send humans to jupiter.

>> discovering something with own eyes and senses
Human senses are extremely limited

And as the oceanographer Robert Ballard points out, the view's better from the screen.

Indeed, Mr. Explorer. Indeed!!!

It's dangerous, impractical and expensive to send humans to a lot of places, but that doesn't stop us from doing it. However limited you think our senses are, they're still the only ones that let us feel anything. He's talking about the experience; if you don't want to experience life (even in uncomfortable or dangerous places), then don't. Someone else will.

I wasnt talking about pressure at all. This was obviously not the point of my analogy.

jupiter is freaky, just imagining how hostile it is to any sort of lifefrom. it's just a big dead ball of gas. When I imagine hell, I think of jupiter.

Human mind aren't.

You need to:
>Replicate or better, the human eye and it's movement.
>Replicate or better, human navigation. In addition to rolling and flying.
>Replicate or better, the human hand.
>Ear is easy, touch/smell/taste is whatever.

AFTER ALL THAT, you have to be close to the probe/robot to have REAL-TIME control.

Why, because time sensitive action is a must in an unpredictable environment.

Look at all those poor Mars rovers.

Unless the probe is AGI, duh.

>There apparently is a hard surface
If you made it there you should be more worried about pressure rather than gravity

>Send people to Jupiter
Are you niggas for real?
How would you even reach escape velocity to take them out?

Is this what it would actually look like above jupiter?

Using pure Elon's rage.

JFK ON JUPITER FARMING ALLUMINUM

According to Arthur C. Clark there's giant floating gassy creatures living in the upper clouds and at the core there's a diamond the size of Earth formed from massive pressure. Of course this is all based on observations from a giant star baby, so maybe take it with a grain of salt.

I remember an old Asimov story where Jupiter has a solid surface and a militant alien civilization. It was pretty cute, the humans build these three big crab-like nuclear-powered robots to go down and act as emissaries, and the aliens start off by nuking them with oxygen. Then once they realize they can't kill the robots they take them around and show off their military industrial complex, but end up intimidated by the giant robots, thinking they're what regular humans are like, and offer a peace treaty.

>>Replicate or better, the human eye and it's movement.
That's stupid. Putting two little eyes on the craft and trying to get them to track the motion of a remote human is stupid. That introduces lag. A better way to do things is to stream 360 degree lightfield video from the craft, from this one can synthesize any stereoscopic view in 360
roadtovr.com/lytros-immerge-360-3d-light-field-pipeline-is-poised-to-redefine-vr-video/

It takes a fuckload of bandwidth, but by the time we are sending people anywhere near jupiter we'll have the tech to do this. A whole lightfield is unnecessary for flying on a gas giant and really just to keep the romantics happy.

Eyes are pretty useless on jupiter though. You can't use them for landmarks because Jupiter's a gas giant and there are no obstructions or other aircraft to avoid because Jupiter's a gas giant. I

>>Replicate or better, human navigation. In addition to rolling and flying
And where exactly are you navigating on a gas giant? Second, you don't need navigation data in real time. You can queue up a bunch of waypoints and send them to plane

Robots are pretty damn good at flying planes and missiles from point A to B. They can even do hard things like like land and are getting at the point where they can do dogfighting. Except on jupiter, all we need is something that can fly, we don't need to land or do extreme maneuvers such as in dog fighting.

>>Replicate or better, the human hand
What exactly do you need a hand for on jupiter? Waving it out the window?

>>you have to be close to the probe/robot to have REAL-TIME control.
and why do you need real time control if the robot can take care of that with the human giving higher level guidance.

Pic related does exactly that. The robot takes care of the low level control keeping the plane level and going from waypoint, the human tells it what way points to go to and where to drop the bombs.

Captcha Galileo

Why would someone do that? It makes no sense to spend money and time on a technology wich wouldn't help that much.
If we want information from these planets, maybe we should just put a satellite there and analyse the chemical composition of it, and that is all.

It might be a cool tourist attraction.

Going to need at least three facebook satellites then.

>Manned
Radiation would like to have a word.

If I initially read your post as "counter terrorist action", does that say anything about me?

You have lots of freedoms

"Allah Ackbar! If the US does not withdraw from Space Syria we will send this resort platform into the Great Red Spot!"

Well using the creativity center of my brain, in 5 seconds i came up with a way to counter those issues.

Just build thicker walls and then create an axis of rotation equal to -2/3 the acceleration of jupiter... you'd be just fine.

As for getting there fast, how about using an EM drive with a solar sail tuned to microwave frequency attached behind it, so you get double the thrust (first out of the EM drive, and then hitting the sail).

Try to think outside the box next time. We need more people with creative insights, not robots.

>mfw when my creative IQ is higher than my intellectual IQ, like einstein

The memedrive doesn't work. Why do you need a solar sail if you have a memedrive?

Travel time isn't the only issue here.

Totally counteractable if we establish decent manufacturing capabilities somewhere where gravity isn't such a huge issue. The moon, Mars, a large astroid, or fuck even in orbit would all reduce the spacecraft mass problem to something manageable and allow the construction of spacecraft with mass budgets large enough to make blocking radiation a non-issue.

As long as we build and launch from Earth, space is going to be an incredibly steep uphill battle. We need to be able to build real no-compromises first-class spacefaring vehicles instead of oversized soda cans.

Bump

Gravity on Neptune is only 11.15 m/s2 vs Earth's 9.807 m/s2, so sure you could.

There's another gas giant, that'd be even easier, but I'd walk into a long series of bad jokes.

Said unnamed gas giant, actually has LESS gravity than Earth, despite being so much larger.

What you are proposing is having a large group of people funded by an even larger group of people work to get a man to expirience a place, which results in one man having expirienced the discovery and a small amount of data being gathered. The rest of the group don't get to expirience anything and the data they would get from an unmanned mission is substantionally more useful to them, than what would be got by a human. There are downsides for everyone with a questionable upside for one man, why would any group of people work towards that?

Reality television. Just think how many people would pay to watch kim kardashian become the first human to 'land' on jupiter.

Short-sighted. A small team of well equipped humans can do hundreds of times as much as a robot can in the same time (unless your "robots" are Star Trek android-level fantasy), paving the way for more humans, creating a snowball effect and eventually opening things up for everybody.

The mistake isn't sending a person somewhere, it's stopping at that. You send the person to make it easier to send more people. You have to keep pushing, not just plant a flag or do wheelies in the sand with the world's most expensive RC car and call it a day.

Doesn't really work unless you can fuck gravity in the ass. At that point you're talking about scifi more than science, so I'm just going to say no.

When I imagine what hell would be like I think of Venus. Mostly because it has a solid surface we've actually seen and is a possible state of earth.

Read the thread.

>>A small team of well equipped humans can do hundreds of times as much as a robot can in the same time
And humans can, when they aren't on a fucking gas giant. So the big thing humans have over robots right now is fine manipulation capability. Want to pick up that rock? You are way better at doing that than a robot.

On Jupiter there aren't any rocks to pick up. It's practically all gas. Manipulation buys you fuck all there. Want to figure that cloud's composition? Just pump it in.

>>paving the way for more humans, creating a snowball effect and eventually opening things up for everybody.
Jupiter is a gas giant and not a very desirable one either. The high gravity will make it difficult to live there. Not to mention because it's a gas giant making permanent settlements is difficult.

Sky cities on Venus have the advantage that breathable air is a lifting gas. Sky cities on Jupiter can barely exist. What's Jupiter made of? Hydrogen and helium. What gases are lighter than hydrogen and helium? NOTHING! So the only way you can stay afloat on Jupiter is with a hot air balloon. A big nuclear powered hot air balloon. We're talking megawatts at the very least just to keep the damn thing in the air.

Oh and the Moon landing never created a snowball effect opening up the Moon for everybody. We planted the flag and left.

>>the world's most expensive RC car and call it a day.
technically it wouldn't be, because it's not on Earth anymore.

Now what really bothers me here is no one has discussed the most practical way to explore Jupiter: a nuclear ramjet. You stick a nuclear reactor inside a ramjet and use that to heat the air rather than burning a hydrocarbon fuel. You get thrust with basically zero moving parts and it's fucking fast(Mach 3). Because it's fucking fast it can circumnavigate Jupiter in reasonable time periods. Pic related

niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/510Maise.pdf

now the control for something like this is relatively simple. The pic related above, could have been made in the 1960s and we have had ramjet powered guided missiles for a long time now.

The only human control we'd need for such a thing is pointing it in the right direction to avoid storms. There is no advantage to having a human 'pilot' on the thing. Because it's so fast, it's not very maneuverable. By the time the pilot notices an obstacle, it would already be too late for them to do anything.

46,000 m/s to 120 m/s, that's one hell of a fucking ride

Yup, probe had to withstand 230 g.
And if you look at the math. The probe dissipated something like 370 gigajoules doing that.

The energy per unit mass is pretty amazing too, something like 1100 megajoules per kilogram.

Then they smashed Galileo itself into Jupiter, with no survivors.

>It's dangerous, impractical, and expensive to send humans to jupiter

Some years ago people argued that it was dangerous, impractical, and expensive to send humans to space.

It still is. As of this moment, there are only 3 people in space.

bump