QUESTION:
What would be harder to overcome, if you were to put people or space
probes on Neptune, the freezing weather or the storms?

Answer from Heidi Hammel on April 24, 1996:
For putting people on Neptune, the hardest thing would not be the cold or
the storms.  It would be the fact that Neptune has no solid surface to land
on!  Neptune is a Gas Giant planet - it has an extremely huge thick
atmosphere.  Way down deep inside, there is a solid rocky core, probably
bigger than Earth.  But the atmosphere is so thick and heavy that people
could not get down to that core - they would be crushed by the huge
atmosphere above before they got there.  The same is true for Jupiter,
Saturn, and Uranus, by the way.

How about a space probe?  We did just send one into Jupiter's atmosphere -
the Galileo Probe (the main Galileo spacecraft is now in orbit around
Jupiter).  We could perhaps someday send a probe into Neptune's atmosphere.
I don't think the storms would be a problem, because we could pick a spot
on Neptune that is relatively calm and storm-free.

A Neptune probe would eventually have the same fate as the Galilo probe
had at Jupiter, either it would be crushed by the extreme pressure of
the thick atmosphere, or it would be burned up by the very high
temperatures deeper down in the atmosphere.  Yes - the HEAT would be a
problem, not the freezing cold. The cloud tops on Neptune are indeed
very cold, as you know.  But as the probe went deeper into the atmosphere,
it would hotter and hotter (remember, Neptune has a strong internal heat
source).  Eventually, it would get so hot that the space probe would
burn up.  But we would learn a whole lot about Neptune before that happens!