Escape Velocity of Jupiter
| Value | 59,500 m/s |
| Status | Conventional / typical value |
| Source | NASA NSSDC Planetary Fact Sheet, Jupiter (escape velocity) |
| Categories | Astronomicalsolar-systemplanets |
| millimeter per year | 1.8776772e+15 mm/yr |
| millimeter per hour | 214,200,000,000 mm/h |
| foot per day | 16,866,142,000 ft/d |
| inch per hour | 8,433,070,900 in/h |
| meter per day | 5,140,800,000 m/d |
| millimeter per minute | 3,570,000,000 mm/min |
| meter per hour | 214,200,000 m/h |
| inch per minute | 140,551,180 in/min |
| millimeter per second | 59,500,000 mm/s |
| foot per minute | 11,712,598 ft/min |
| centimeter per second | 5,950,000 cm/s |
| meter per minute | 3,570,000 m/min |
| inch per second | 2,342,519.7 in/s |
| kilometer per hour | 214,200 km/h |
| foot per second | 195,209.97 ft/s |
| mile per hour | 133,097.71 mph |
| knot | 115,658.75 kn |
| meter per second | 59,500 m/s |
| mach (sea level) | 174.84881 Ma |
| kilometer per second | 59.5 km/s |
| speed of light | 0.00019847064 c |
Learning zone
At 59.5 km/s, Jupiter's escape velocity outruns the thermal speed of any gas at any temperature the planet has ever had — which is why its composition, roughly 90 per cent hydrogen and 10 per cent helium by count, is essentially the recipe of the primordial solar nebula, preserved for 4.6 billion years. The rocky planets lost their hydrogen envelopes; Jupiter is a sample of what everything started from, which is exactly why the Galileo probe was sent to taste it.
The same deep well makes Jupiter the solar system's gatekeeper. Comets and asteroids that stray close are flung onto new trajectories or swallowed outright — Shoemaker–Levy 9 struck at over 60 km/s in 1994, its fragments releasing the energy of millions of megatons. And spacecraft borrow from the well constantly: gravity assists off Jupiter accelerated Voyager, Ulysses, Cassini and New Horizons to destinations no rocket of the day could have reached directly.