You don't actually have a surface of Jupiter. You shine a big strong radar pulse at Jupiter, and what you get back is four tiny blips. You see the moons of Jupiter just fine, in fact we can study them by radar, Jupiter isn’t there, it’s like a stealth planet. If you have radar eyes, you’d wonder what these things were circling.  

 

  For a stealthy planet, Jupiter makes a big blip on the space travel radar. And it’s a target worth a trip. The best way to testify a trip to Jupiter is to retrace the extraordinary journey of the only spacecraft to orbit it. Launched by shuttle, the Galileo spacecraft left earth in 1989 for an odyssey that lasted for 14 years. The first three were spent simply trying to leave the neighborhood with enough speed to go the distance. Three times farther than Mars, about half a billion miles, the road to Jupiter is a long one with a few bumps along the way.