Into Jupiter
+260,000 km
Space
−150 °C
vacuum
Approach · 260,000 km out
The Giant
Eleven Earths wide and spinning once every ten hours. Its bands are jet streams racing in opposite directions, and the Great Red Spot is a storm bigger than our planet that has raged for centuries. Io's shadow drifts across the clouds.
Scroll to fall in ↓
Cloud tops · 1 bar
Ammonia Skies
Jupiter has no surface to land on. The white zones are high clouds of ammonia ice, lit by a Sun five times farther away than it is from Earth, at a chilly −108 °C.
40 – 90 km down
Storm Decks
Below the ammonia lie tan clouds of ammonium hydrosulfide, then towering water clouds. Lightning here is far stronger than Earth's and flickers through the murk.
1,000 – 15,000 km
The Deep Atmosphere
Sunlight is gone. The pressure climbs past thousands of Earth atmospheres, and hydrogen stops being a gas or a liquid and becomes something in between: a supercritical fluid, glowing red-hot. Helium condenses and falls as rain.
15,000 – 35,000 km
Metallic Hydrogen
Squeezed at two million bar, hydrogen gives up its electrons and becomes a liquid metal. Churning currents in this ocean power a magnetic field twenty thousand times stronger than Earth's.
The center · 71,492 km down
The Fuzzy Core
Juno found a core with no sharp edge: rock and ice dissolved into metallic hydrogen, spread across nearly half the planet. At the center it's about 20,000 °C, hotter than the surface of the Sun.