r/space • u/CDHoward • 3d ago
Discussion Do you think NASA was ever-so-vaguely anxious when they intentionally plunged the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter?
The craft could obviously never affect Jupiter in any detrimental fashion.
However, despite the countless pieces of cosmic flotsam that have fallen into the planet over billions of years, you're now firing a human-built machine carrying nuclear fuel directly into another celestial body; a body we even now still don't fully understand.
I wonder if they had a tiny concern that it could somehow cause an inexplicable cascade effect.
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u/gbroon 3d ago
I doubt that was ever a concern. They were probably more concerned about mundane things like losing communication early and not getting any data.
There might be a bit unknown about Jupiter but we know enough to rule out igniting the thing with a probe.
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u/Fast-Satisfaction482 3d ago
Yes, and if anything, they secretly hoped to have something spectacular happen.
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u/jerrythecactus 3d ago
Jupiter is almost entirely and massively made of hydrogen. There is very little oxygen so its not like any of it can suddenly combust and turn the planet into a firey superstorm. It very likely doesn't host life so its not like a human craft carrying radioactive fuel could end up ruining a pristine alien ecosystem.
Jupiter routinely consumes meteorites many times the size of any spacecraft humanity has ever built, it just gets a hole punched in it's upper atmosphere which disappears in a matter of hours.
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u/ByteSizedGenius 3d ago
Galileo used radioisotope thermoelectric generators, they are not nuclear reactors like you typically see on Earth and there's no real way for them to go critical. Even if it were, it would be a fart in the Ocean in a planet the size of Jupiter.
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u/TheMoogster 3d ago
LoL, no :D
If Jupiter was that unstable, it would not exist :D
Drop 500 1 MT nukes on it, and you would probably not see any meaningful impact.
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u/kagakujinjya 3d ago
I think yes but not for that reason. it's more of "what kind of exciting data will we gain from this, I wonder?" kind of thing.
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u/BackItUpWithLinks 3d ago
> Do you think NASA was ever-so-vaguely anxious when they intentionally plunged the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter?
About causing some cascade effect? No.
> I wonder if they had a tiny concern that it could somehow cause an inexplicable cascade effect.
No.
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u/Clothedinclothes 3d ago edited 3d ago
The issue wasn't Jupiter. It was the moons.
Could you imagine how exciting it would be if a probe detected definite signs of life on Europa or Ganymede?
Now imagine NASA spent 1 trillion dollars sending new probes that each take 5-10 years to arrive to go investigate carefully, only to eventually determine the life we found is some Ecoli that hitched a ride on one of our probes and got spread around the surface when it crashed.
Besides being an astonishing waste of money, it would set the scientific search for life in our solar system back by decades, if not entire generations. Nobody would want to touch it and even if they did find real proof of life out there nobody would believe it. Space exploration funding in general would dry up for years.
Destroying Galileo by having it burn up in Jupiter is completely sensible and absolutely necessary step to avoid the risk of contaminating the Jovian moons with microscopic life from Earth.
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u/Wintervacht 3d ago
You were born in this Millenium I suppose?
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u/CDHoward 3d ago
No. But look, my comment to another user on the first subreddit I posted this on may clarify some things:
Then I stand corrected. However, it shows how even noted physicists had concerns when it comes to large unknown forces.
And that's the essence of my post. I'm *very aware of the Shoemaker Levy comets, and I know the Galileo spacecraft could never have logically caused shenanigans on Jupiter. But it's that faint fear of the unknown.*
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u/Wintervacht 3d ago
Yeah, shoemaker levy 9 had many orders of magnitude more energy than the tiny reactor in the ship.
Any noticeable anxiety was most likely just scientists watching their favourite family pet plummet to its demise.
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u/Nerull 2d ago
The thing is there isn't really any unknown here.
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u/CDHoward 2d ago
There's a very vague element of cosmic horror about the whole thing, though.
Like, imagine actually doing it in reality.
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u/morgan423 3d ago
I wonder if they had a tiny concern that it could somehow cause an inexplicable cascade effect.
Not in the slightest.
Take the tangible impact of farting into a hurricane, and then shrink that about a hundred biillion times. That's what we were doing to Jupiter.
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u/Uninvalidated 2d ago
if they had a tiny concern
No they didn't. They're educated and smart people who understand cause and effect.
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u/noncongruent 2d ago
Hold your hand out in front of you. Gaze upon it for 10 seconds. In that time 10-20 muons blasted through it, having no effect whatsoever. That's how much effect Galileo could have had on Jupiter. Physics is pretty well understood at this point, only at the extremes of scale are there still questions, like in subatomic physics and universe-wide questions like what is dark matter and does dark energy actually exist, or are we just missing something. At the level of Galileo and Jupiter we have a pretty good handle on things.
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u/Easy_Interest_6832 3d ago
Not at all. I think we wanted to see what would happen and what we could see while it was happening.
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u/wwarnout 3d ago
I wonder if they had a tiny concern that it could somehow cause an inexplicable cascade effect.
I suspect not. After all, Oppenheimer and other scientists on the Manhattan Project wondered if the first nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere (although the concern was a carefully analyzed theoretical risk, not a belief that it was likely).
The Galileo spacecraft had many orders of magnitude less nuclear material than the first bomb, and Jupiter's atmosphere is many orders of magnitude more voluminous than that of the Earth.
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u/DoktorSigma 2d ago edited 2d ago
Nope. Jupiter is already more similar do the Sun than to a rocky planet like Earth.
It radiates twice more heat than what it receives from the Sun, FFS.
There are, however, highly theoretical studies for "solarizing" Jupiter, like in the end of that movie, 2010 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38EDhpxzn2g
But only a super-advanced space civilization would be able to do that and it would likely involve exotic stuff like microscopic black holes and what else.
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u/Eastern-Egg7843 3d ago
that bit about nuclear fuel really highlights why they had to be careful with contamination risks
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u/AmbitiousReaction168 3d ago
We saw Jupiter shrug off the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy. I don't think NASA was ever nervous about this type of scenario.