How theoretically possible is it to have a spacecraft that could make it deep into one of the gas giants...

How theoretically possible is it to have a spacecraft that could make it deep into one of the gas giants? What would we need? How many centuries would it be before it'd be feasible? Would there be any reason we'd want to do it?

I understand that there are theories of space colonies in Jupiter's upper atmosphere. That sounds pretty cool.. not likely to happen anytime soon. But it's cool. Just interested in the lower layers as well.

Since it's not a terrestrial planet depth matters more than.. let's say.. the rocky depths into the core of Mars. We can't really reach that.

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diamond spacecraft may work

That seems equivalent to asking about abyssal submarines before we have even learned to swim. Compare the gravity well of Earth, Mars or the Moon to that of Jupiter:
xkcd.com/681_large/

>I understand that there are theories of space colonies in Jupiter's upper atmosphere.

no there aren't

>>I understand that there are theories of space colonies in Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
you wouldn't colonize jupiter. Gravity's fucking high and you've got deathly radiation belts to punch through on the way there.

It maybe sort of makes sense to mine the atmosphere for helium 3, but you do not need people for that. Just a bunch of nuclear powered hot air balloons with helium 3 separation plants.

Today, depending on your definition of spacecraft and deep. According to the phase diagram of carbon a hunk of diamond in the shape of a dart ought to get pretty pretty deep into Jupiter before melting. Yes melting. At these insano-pressures diamond can fucking melt. According to the phase diagram you get in to something like 1 megabar before your diamond dart melts. It is best to speak of gas giants using pressure for depth rather than distance. This is deep enough to get into the liquid hydrogen ocean of Jupiter. Anything past that will require new materials beyond the current roadmap or a better understanding of ultra-ultra-high pressure chemistry. Translation, hell fucking no!

Anything more than a dart is really fucking hard. While diamond won't melt at these temperatures, we don't have electronics that can function anywhere near these temperatures. Regular silicon electronics conk out at 300 C. Silicon carbide electronics work at 500 C just not very well. 1000 C, well uh, someone made a diode out of diamond that works at that temperature. We could maybe make fucking diamond vacuum tubes that work at this temperature. Past that, all those "we put XXXXX material under bullshittingly high pressure and found it semiconducts!" articles seem pretty fucking useful.

Near term, we could throw out all the electronics and do something like NASA's proposed automaton rover: nasa.gov/feature/automaton-rover-for-extreme-environments-aree

One of the big problems is getting data back. Jupiter's fucking huge and cloudy. Because it's just so goddamn thick, it's hard to get radio data back.

Galileo's probe got fucking trashed on entry, we had a thread featuing it a little while back.

>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.

So the way I think one could do it is make a nuclear reactor that's consist of a bunch of fuel encased in ceramic. We do this because our fuel is going to melt down, ceramics just there to keep it in place. We use this goddamn china syndrome to boil lead or whatever else is a good working fluid at these insane conditions, which turns a turbine, which drives an electrostatic generator. Electrostatic because hell fucking no can we get magnets that work in these conditions. We then use the electrostatic generator to drive a spark gap radio.

We use a spark gap radio because we can't use vacuum tubes, transistors, or even alexanderson alternators(no magnets lel) and because we need low frequency to punch through jupiter's super thick atmosphere.

We mount the whole enchirito on a big conical deceleration plate like the venera landers used and have the thing trail as long of a tungsten filament we can manage for an antenna.

So there you have it, a ceramic nuclear reactor whose sole purpose is to drive a spark gap radio. Any scientific instruments on it are basically an after-thought. We could get really fancy and maybe add some temperature and pressure sensors that modulate the spark gap radio.

And with the materials we have today, it's totally fucked before we hit the cool stuff like the liquid hydrogen layer. But if we target Uranus or Neptune, which are much smaller and cooler, holy fuck we can get thousands of kilometers in before tungsten melts! We could probably get deep enough in to hit something solid or liquid without melting.

Pic related: artist's impression of diamond mining on Saturn from the book "Alien Seas." You might enjoy the section on how diamond mining on Saturn might be accomplished

need obsidian

Kek