You can't land a spaceship on Uranus
It being a gas giant and all. I think that bothered me more than the fact that were aliens living there.
shareI think Chris Christie's may be the exception.
MovieChat Forums > Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) Discussion > You can't land a spaceship on Uranus
Yes this bothered me a lot too. Did they not know this back then? I find that hard to believe. Why not just make it pluto or mars or something?
shareIn 1962 when this was filmed John Glenn had just circled or would soon circle the earth. So how would anyone have known whether a landing was possible? That theory sounds good.
Just temporarily empty your brain and enjoy the flick.
Kind of like all the Titanic movies and stories made before its discovery in 1985, they were all wrong. "Raise the Titanic" from 1979 is an impossibility but it sounded good at the time.
Astronomers measured the angular diameter of Uranus and it's distance. Thus they could calculate its volume. Astronomers measured the distances of the large moons of Uranus from the center of the planet, and thus could calculate the circumferences of their orbits. They measured how long it took for the moons to orbit Uranus. And so they calculated how massive Uranus would have to be for the speeds of the moons to be the correct orbital velocities at those distances.
So if you know the volume and the mass of an object, you can calculate its average density. The overall and average density of Uranus is 1.27 grams per cubic centimeter, 0.2303 of Earth's density of 5.514 grams per cubic centimeter.
The visible surface layer of Uranus is a layer of clouds in its atmosphere. The atmosphere is mostly composed of the two lightest gases, hydrogen and helium.
Every planet gets denser and denser, and hotter and hotter, with increasing depth within it. So the atmospheres of the giant planets are believed to get thicker and thicker and thicker with increasing depth until they are a dense as Earth's oceans and until they are as dense as the deepest layers of Earth's oceans and keep on getting denser and denser until eventually they gradually merge with the "solid" cores of their planets..
Thus a spaceship trying to land on a giant planet would fall deeper and deeper into the atmosphere until the atmosphere became as dense as an ocean, and the spaceship floated in an atmospheric layer like a submarine in the ocean. Or maybe the spaceship would fall until it was crushed by the ever increasing pressure.
In the early days of the space race, decades before any space probes visited the outer planets, the popular books on astronomy and outer space all said that the giant planets had no solid surfaces but their atmospheres just gradually became superdense and merged with the incredibly dense and exotic cores of those planets.
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Some early 20th century science fiction stories depicted solid surfaces on the giant planets.
Jupiter had a solid surface in Spacehounds of IPC (1931) and Triplanetary(1934) by E.E. Smith, for example. The only example I rmember of Uranus having a solid surface is in "The Planet of Doubt", by Stanely G. Weibaum, Astounding Stories, October 1935.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1401921h.html
And even that early the idea of the giant planets having solid surfaces may have been disproved. Certainly by the time that Journey to the Seventh Planet, 1961, was made the idea that giant planets in our solar system had solid surfaces was discredited, and few science fiction editors would publish stories where the giant planets had solid surfaces. By 1961 the fimakers could have found teenage and even preteen astronomy fans who could have told them the giant planets didn't have solid surfaces.
The deep interiors of the giant planets have pressures and temperatures which are hard for us to imagine. Here is a quote about possible conditions in some layers of the interior of Uranus:
The extreme pressure and temperature deep within Uranus may break up the methane molecules, with the carbon atoms condensing into crystals of diamond that rain down through the mantle like hailstones.[75][76][77] Very-high-pressure experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggest that the base of the mantle may comprise an ocean of liquid diamond, with floating solid 'diamond-bergs'.[78][79] Scientists also believe that rainfalls of solid diamonds occur on Uranus, as well as on Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.[80][81]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus#Internal_structure share
According to an answer to this question: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/14083/when-was-it-realized-that-the-giant-planets-do-not-have-solid-surfaces astronomers realized that the giant planets didn't have solid surfaces in the 1920s and 1930s.
Sorry, Professor, but ... wrong.
Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants. Uranus and Neptune are ice giants.
"In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
Yes and no.
You'll eventually hit something solid.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Uranus-intern-en.png
You would have to go far down to its core, which they believe is approx the size of Earth. The core is prolly ice or at least a large portion of it is. However, the radius of Uranus including its gas layers is many times larger than Earth.
shareMaybe we only think that because the aliens are tricking us. The movie makes it clear they can use mind control. so maybe they also found a way to trick far-off astronomers into thinking their planet is a gas giant to keep them away.
share