The best pictures we have of Jupiter's atmosphere are probably these carefully processed mosaics of the Great Red Spot, but they're still taken from very far away. If our submarine survived, what would we see? I mean, submarines don't usually have a lot of windows, but we at least have a periscope, right? We could, I guess, try to do the same thing with a submarine-by mounting a giant heat shield on the front-but it would probably qualify as the most Kerbal vehicle ever built.

The probe only sent back about half a megabyte of data to the Galileo orbiter, and had no camera, so we don't know what it saw. The Galileo probe survived by being a bullet with a big heat shield, and several inches of the shield were burned away before it finished slowing down and started falling vertically by parachute. Only the Galileo probe has survived a Jupiter atmospheric entry. There's no easy way to shed that speed other than slamming into the atmosphere and letting it slow you down, but the entry is about four times faster than the Space Shuttle or Apollo Earth reentries. Jupiter has a deep gravity well after falling down toward it from space, you're going very fast. If you took a submarine to Jupiter, it would burn up. One had no cameras, and one went in at night (and was being disposed of, so wasn't taking pictures anyway). We don't know! We've only flown spacecraft into a gas planet's atmosphere twice (both Jupiter). If you did fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, what would it actually look like? What would you see before you melted or burned up?

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions comes out 9/13.

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