That moment, at least in artist conception, looked something like this.
You can see the, the heat shield is glowing red hot falling away.
And, there's the probe on its nice big parachute,
suddenly going in the atmosphere.
We can actually take a look at what this thing looked like before it launched,
the actual Galileo probe itself.
It looks like some ancient World War II submarine,
experimental something or another.
And, it looks this way, because it has to withstand these
these incredible pressures as it's going down below.
It's got instruments.
We won't go into detail about all the instruments, but
all of these are different, different sensors that the probe has
that it could measure many different things as it went down.
And, the sort of time line of it's mission looks like this.
So, here it is as it's screaming into the atmosphere at at 50 kilometers a second.
Slows down precipitously, drops a little parachute fir, first.
Drops the heat shield right there.
Heat shield goes plummeting down into the interior of Jupiter.
Now, we know at least one thing that's in the interior of Jupiter.
And, the parachute deploys, and it starts to go.
So, what does it see as it goes down?
It sees wispy clouds down for a while.
Finally, a cloud layer down here at the bottom.
And, about an hour later, communications are finally lost,
as it turns out the probe eventually overheated and died.
Not surprisingly, it was designed to last about this length of time.
Right before it died, it was at a pressure of 24 bars.
Again, a bar is the surface pressure of the Earth,
so it was 24 times the atmospheric pressure of the Earth.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a tiny, tiny,
tiny bit of the interior of Jupiter.
If I drew you Jupiter, and I wanted to show you how far down the Galileo probe
went, I would draw it something like that.
Do you see that?
No, you don't see that.
It's because you could not even draw something that small.
It just was the tiniest, tiniest thin section.
And yet, one of the things that we think we know about Jupiter is that,
rather than we're not quite sure what's going on at the center,
we think that much of the outer part of it should be fairly well mixed.
So, even if you can just sample, a tiny, tiny outer layer,
you're learning a lot about the composition all the way down through.