Tracy Drain

Off to Jupiter we go.

Yeah, we've talked a little bit about power, one of the reasons why we have those giant arrays because it's so far away.

You need to get a lot of energy if you're going to be solar power.

But the other giant challenge is the radiation.

Jupiter is such a marvellous place.

It is...

It's made mostly of hydrogen and helium.

You can fit 11 Earths across the center of Jupiter.

And the thing that makes it a particularly challenging neighborhood is because that hydrogen is compressed under its own mass.

There's so much of it.

And as you get deeper and deeper and deeper into the planet, it gets compressed into a liquid.

And as you get deeper and deeper, the pressures and temperatures are so intense that the little –

Electrons that go around each hydrogen atom get squeezed right off.

And so inside of this liquid metallic interior, you have free-flowing electrons, and that makes an electrical field.

Now Jupiter, even though it's so big, it rotates really fast.

Here on Earth, we rotate once every 24 hours.

At Jupiter, that giant planet rotates once every 10 hours.

So you're rotating this monster electrical field.

And if you remember your high school physics, a rotating electrical field generates a magnetic field.

And there are all sorts of other things going on inside there with convection and the way that the fluid is moving.