Getting a spacecraft like Galileo to Jupiter is itself a huge engineering challenge. How would it be possible to get a probe into at least the upper atmosphere, so that it could record images, sample the atmospheric contents, possibly move from place to place and so on?
This challenge involves multiple disciplines. There is the issue of how to get the craft to Jupiter – though this issue has largely been solved at least in principle. Then there is the issue of getting a probe into the atmosphere – at the bottom of a deep gravity well, it will have a lot of kinetic energy to lose if it isn’t to be destroyed! Then there is the issue of getting the probe to do something more than simply float downwards on a parachute, and somehow transmit significant amounts of data.
Tags: Jupiter probe
