Why would it be difficult for a person to survive on neptune?

Answer 1

More the latter - Neptune does not have a solid surface. Neptune is an "oddball" planet - it generates more of it's own energy than it receives from the sun. Most interesting are it's winds, estimated on the surface at over 1,000 MPH because of it's vast temperature extremes of heating from the exterior (the Sun) and heating from the interior (Neptune itself).

Answer 2

For a start, Neptune is very, very far away, so the trip would take a very long time! Voyager 2, the only spacecraft that's ever been to Neptune, took 12 years to get there, but it took advantage of a special planetary alignment that could speed it up. Nowadays, if we made the same journey, it would take over 30 years to get there from Earth. Assuming you didn't spend too many years at Neptune, you'd spend most of your life - 60 years - getting there and back! Of course, this might not be a problem in future, with better spacecraft technology.

No matter how fast we can get there though, Neptune will always be a pretty bleak place for humans to visit. There's no solid surface, so we couldn't land there - just a thick atmosphere covered in clouds. The atmosphere isn't breathable, made up of hydrogen, helium and methane. It would be very, very cold - around -218 Celsius! And the winds on Neptune are intense - nearly 1000 kilometres per hour in some places! Neptune is the stormiest planet in the Solar System.

So you'd have to set off very fast, using rocket technology we don't yet have, if you wanted to get there and back in a sensible time frame, and you'd need a very thick, warm spacesuit with plenty of oxygen to breathe that could float in Neptune's clouds and withstand the intense winds... not the easiest of space missions!

Perhaps someday though astronauts will eventually overcome these challenges and go to Neptune, and it will be worth it. Very little is currently known about Neptune, as only one probe has ever flown past, so a manned mission would teach us a lot of valuable scientific information. And it would be a breathtaking sight - Neptune looks a lot like Earth, with its deep blue skies and swirling white clouds, and has a beautiful system of rings and moons. Perhaps the best sight though would be looking back at the Sun. Neptune is so far away that the Sun is just a dot in the sky - a very bright star. No wonder it's so cold! And Earth would be so close to the Sun that it would be totally lost in the Sun's glare.

Answer 3

Because it probably doesn't have a "surface" as we think of it. Neptune is a gas giant planet, mostly made of liquified or slushy gasses. We're not even sure if it has a solid core.

Answer 4

First of all, there is no surface to stand on. Second, it is extremely cold. Third, this is no oxygen, Fourth, winds typically reach several hundred miles per hour.

Answer 5

Neptune has no food water or O2

Answer 6

there is no air.