Galileo Atmospheric Entry Probe Spacecraft: "Mission to Jupiter" 1989 NASA JPL

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'This video contains Galileo probe animation, mission diagrams, and testing and manufacturing footage. No sound. Released Oct. 1989.'

Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Probe

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Galileo Probe was an atmospheric-entry automatic space probe carried by the main Galileo spaceprobe to Jupiter, where it directly entered a hot spot and returned data from the planet. The 340-kilogram (750 lb) probe was built by Hughes Aircraft Company at its El Segundo, California plant, and measured about 1.3 meters (4.3 ft) across. Inside the probe's heat shield, the scientific instruments were protected from extreme heat and pressure during its high-speed journey into the Jovian atmosphere, entering at 48 kilometers (30 mi) per second. It entered Jupiter on December 7, 1995, 22:04 UTC and stopped functioning at 23:00 UTC, 57 minutes and 36 seconds later...

Mission

The probe was released from the main spacecraft in July 1995, five months before reaching Jupiter, and entered Jupiter's atmosphere with no braking beforehand. The probe was slowed from its arrival speed of about 48 kilometers per second to subsonic speed in less than two minutes. The rapid flight through the atmosphere produced a plasma with a temperature around 15,500 °C (28,000 °F), and the probe's carbon phenolic heat shield lost more than half of its mass during the descent.

At the time, this was by far the most difficult atmospheric entry ever attempted; the probe entered at Mach 50 and had to withstand a peak deceleration of 228 g. The probe's 152 kg heat shield, making up almost half of the probe's total mass, lost 80 kg during the entry. NASA built a special laboratory, the Giant Planet Facility, to simulate the heat load, which was similar to the convective and radiative heating experienced by an ICBM warhead reentering the atmosphere. It then deployed its 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) parachute, and dropped its heat shield, which fell into Jupiter's interior.

As the probe descended through 156 kilometers (97 mi) of the top layers of the Jovian atmosphere, it collected 58 minutes of data on the local weather. It only stopped transmitting when the ambient pressure exceeded 23 atmospheres and the temperature reached 153 °C (307 °F). The data was sent to the spacecraft overhead, then transmitted back to Earth...

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-kilometer (97 mi) downward journey. Subsequent analysis determined that the Galileo probe had entered a so-called hot spot in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Radio contact ceased (due to the high temperature) 78 minutes after entering Jupiter's atmosphere at a depth of 160 kilometers.[citation needed] At that point the probe measured a pressure of 22 bars and a temperature of 152 °C. 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...