Question: do you think you could send a group of astronauts to Jupiter ?

Monique Henson answered on 16 Nov 2015:

I think it’s physically possible to get them near to Jupiter, but there are still a few details we’d need to work out.

I don’t think they’d be able to land on Jupiter as such – I’m not sure if it has a surface in the same way that the Earth or Mars do. It’s a gas giant, which means it’s composed of mostly hydrogen and helium. I think there’s evidence that it has a core that’s mostly solid, but whether or not you could stand on it is debatable. Plus, to even reach the core you’d have to pass through really high pressure gases in really extreme conditions.

In terms of travelling to Jupiter, I think there are probably a few challenges we need to overcome. One of the biggest is how to the astronauts back. We have the technology to send things out into space (e.g. the New Horizons probe that went to Pluto), but if we’re sending people we probably want them to come home afterwards. It’s a bit trickier to do that as we need some way to turn them around and speed them up in the right direction.

We also need to think about the food supply. Carrying enough food for a long journey like that adds lots of mass to the space ship. That makes it more expensive and more difficult to get it into space. One option is to grow food on the ship during the journey, but there have only been small attempts to grow lettuce and similar things on the space station so far.

Overall, I think there are quite a few challenges we need to overcome first (I’m sure there are more than those I’ve mentioned here), but I think we’ll get there eventually.