There is no ground on Jupiter. Just weather, all the way down, for 70,000 kilometres.
For this trip you are indestructible. Nothing can hurt you. As you fall, we will tell you what a real body would be going through.
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60 km above the clouds
Jupiter fills everything below you, striped cream and rust, wider than eleven Earths.
The air up here is thin and bitterly cold. Its gravity has you now, pulling two and a half times harder than Earth's.
A real body: You would weigh 2.5 times your Earth weight, and you'd need a spacesuit for the cold and the missing oxygen.
10 km above the clouds
You punch into the top cloud deck. These are the bright white bands we see through telescopes from Earth.
They're made of ammonia ice: snow, but not the kind you'd want to catch on your tongue.
A real body: Ammonia would sting your eyes and burn your throat, if the −130 °C cold hadn't got you first.
40 km down
The white gives way to tan and rust. This layer is ammonium hydrosulfide, and it gives Jupiter its darker belts.
It would smell awful: rotten eggs mixed with household cleaner.
A real body: Twice Earth's air pressure. You'd feel it in your ears, and still be freezing at −70 °C.
90 km down
Now the clouds are water, like the ones at home, only far bigger. Lightning flickers inside them.
Since 2016, NASA's Juno spacecraft has been circling Jupiter, peering down through these clouds. It found hail here too: slushy balls of ammonia and water nicknamed mushballs.
At around 0 °C, this is the one place on the way down that feels a little like Earth.
A real body: Six times Earth's air pressure, like diving 50 metres under the sea. Comfortable temperature, though.
150 km down
In 1995 NASA dropped a probe the size of a kitchen table into Jupiter. It fell through these clouds sending data for 58 minutes.
Its signal went quiet right about here. From now on, you are deeper than anything humans have ever sent.
A real body: 150 °C and 22 times Earth's air pressure. A real body would already be cooked and crushed.
400 km down
The last of the sunlight is gone. Nothing from outside reaches this deep.
The Great Red Spot's roots reach down to about here. A storm wider than Earth, with its feet hundreds of kilometres deep.
A real body: Hotter than a pizza oven, and the only light is the dull red glow of the heat itself.
1,000 km down
The gas is now so squeezed it behaves like a hot, thick sea. But there's no surface where the gas turns to liquid. It just keeps getting thicker.
There is no ground. There never will be.
A real body: A thousand times Earth's air pressure, like lying on the floor of the deepest ocean trench, at 1,000 °C.
3,000 km down
Jupiter's famous stripes are made by jet streams, and Juno found they reach down about 3,000 km before fading away.
Below here the planet turns as one, like a single huge spinning ball of fluid.
A real body: The pressure is more than ten thousand times Earth's. Nothing solid we've ever built would keep its shape.
23,000 km down
A third of the way to the centre. Hydrogen, the simplest stuff in the universe, is squeezed until it becomes a liquid metal and carries electricity.
This churning ocean of metal powers Jupiter's magnetic field, the strongest of any planet, about 20,000 times Earth's.
Scientists think helium falls as rain down here, drops sinking through the metal.
A real body: Two million times Earth's air pressure, and hotter than the surface of the Sun.
45,000 km down
You're sinking through liquid metal hydrogen, an ocean tens of thousands of kilometres deep.
You could drop the whole Earth into it and never touch either side.
A real body: Over ten million times Earth's air pressure. Atoms themselves are being squeezed out of shape.
70,000 km down
You made it to the centre of Jupiter.
We used to picture a neat ball of rock down here. Juno found something stranger: the core is fuzzy, with heavy elements smeared through the inner part of the planet. Maybe a giant collision stirred it billions of years ago. Scientists are still arguing.
And for the first time since you jumped, you weigh nothing. All of Jupiter pulls on you equally from every side.
A real body: 45 million times Earth's air pressure and about 20,000 °C, nearly four times hotter than the Sun's surface.
Seventy thousand kilometres. You fell the whole way.
You would never land. Jupiter has no surface, just gas that gets thicker and hotter the deeper you go, for 70,000 km.
A real person would be fine for the first few minutes in a spacesuit, then crushed and cooked within the first few hundred kilometres. NASA's Galileo probe lasted 58 minutes and went silent about 150 km down.
Keep going and the hydrogen around you turns into a liquid metal. At the centre it's about 20,000 °C, under 45 million times Earth's air pressure.
No. Jupiter has no solid surface. Its air simply thickens into a hot, dense fluid with no clear edge, so there is nowhere to stand at any depth.
Not long. Even inside a probe built for it, Galileo survived only 58 minutes before the heat and pressure, about 150 °C and 22 times Earth's air pressure, shut it down.
A fuzzy core. NASA's Juno spacecraft found that Jupiter's heavy elements are smeared through the inner part of the planet rather than packed into a neat rocky ball.
Yes. NASA's Galileo probe parachuted into Jupiter in December 1995, and the Galileo orbiter itself was sent diving into the planet in 2003 at the end of its mission.
