Professor Questions Unit 14

Name

Professor

Subject

Date

Divine Descent into Jupiter

I imagined myself to be like Dante in his Divine Comedy , a traveler into an unknown world , who had little knowledge of this new world that I was venturing , if at all . Jupiter has been observed for centuries and until now , so little about it is known . Acting like a massive curtain , clouds literally envelope the whole planet . Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system - it is 2 .5 times more massive than all the other planets combined . It

belongs to an exclusive group of gaseous planets Saturn , Neptune , and Uranus are the other members of this group . Hence , this was a high risk mission observations and speculations about the giant planet 's structure and climate are uncertain . I was part of the first manned mission on this planet . I hoped to document everything that I would see as we explore this unknown yet eerily familiar world

Who knows how many years have passed since we left the earth ? Jupiter is approximately 4 .2 astronomical units from the Earth at their closest orbit (1 astronomical unit AU is ninety three million miles . The last unmanned spacecraft was able to reach Jupiter in just over a year , but it was significantly lighter and less complicated than our spacecraft now . Even from Earth-based telescopes , the atmospheric conditions , at least the outer atmosphere , were observed to be very violent

The first thing that I noticed before entering Jupiter 's atmosphere was the...