A Farewell to Galileo

Mercury, November/December 2003 Table of Contents

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.

by David H. Levy

The valiant Galileo spacecraft finally ended its mission on September 21 in a blaze of glory over Jupiter.

When the valiant Galileo spacecraft finally ended its mission on September 21 in a blaze of glory over Jupiter, it had to bear the consequences of its own discoveries. Its beautiful pictures of Europa, which hint of a possible global ocean of liquid water beneath the icy crust, meant that under no circumstances could NASA allow it to crash into this pristine world. The spacecraft engineers and scientists were astute enough to plan for such contingencies.

We remember Galileo’s prime and extended missions within the Jupiter system and the extraordinary data it relayed home despite a crippled main antenna. We get upset when we don’t receive email messages with large attachments in less than a second. Galileo managed to complete and transmit all of its Jupiter observations at 10 bits per second, 1/30th the speed modems had 20 years ago.

Galileo was caught from the outset in the changing technologies that abounded in the early 1980s, a time when the Space Shuttle was seen as America’s answer to every possible space mission. As the mission evolved into the late 1980s, its journey became a mini-Grand Tour II after Voyager — a trip past Venus and twice past Earth before finally heading out to the asteroids and Jupiter.

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