I was listening to the latest episode of the Space Rocket History podcast. The show includes some audio from a documentary on Pioneer 11 that mentioned that a man would weigh 500 pounds on Jupiter.

My immediate thought was “Is that all?! Is this ‘man’ a 100 pound boy?”

The documentary was correct and my intuition was wrong. And the implied mass of the man in the documentary is 190 pounds.

Jupiter has more than 300 times more mass than the earth. Why is its surface gravity only 2.6 times that of the earth?

Although Jupiter is very massive, it is also very large. Gravitational attraction is proportional to mass, but inversely proportional to the square of distance.

A satellite in orbit 100,000 km from the center of Jupiter would feel 300 times as much gravity as one in orbit the same distance from the center of Earth. But the surface of Jupiter is further from its center of mass than the surface of Earth is from its center of mass.

The mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth, and the its mean radius is 11 times that of Earth. So the ratio of gravity on the surface of Jupiter to gravity on the Earth’s surface is

318 / 11² = 2.63

Now suppose a planet had the same density as Earth but a radius of r Earth radii. Then its mass would be r³ times greater, but its surface gravity would only be r times greater since gravity follows an inverse square law. So if Jupiter were made of the same stuff as Earth, its surface gravity would be 11 times greater. But Jupiter is a gas giant, so its surface gravity is only 2.6 times greater.

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