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Galileo: Jupiter
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The Galileo mission was a huge success! Originally, the Galileo orbiter was expected to last about two years in orbit around Jupiter. Even though Galileo was damaged by radiation in the magnetosphere of Jupiter, it kept working for eight years. It sent back hundreds of pictures of the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).
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Galileo (1564-1642) was the first astronomer to make full use of the telescope, observing the craters of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter. His open advocacy of Copernican cosmology led... to a clash with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and he spent his final years under house arrest.
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Galileo arrived at Jupiter, on December 7, 1995, and performed several important tasks to place itself in the correct orbit around Jupiter. It then relayed about 60 minutes of data from an atmospheric probe as it descended into Jupiter's atmosphere. The spacecraft made its closest flyby of Io at the same time, just 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away, and performed scientific investigations of Io's volcanic moon. Once the probe's signal was lost - - the probe was vaporized because of the high termperatures of Jupiter's atmosphere - - the larger part of the spacecraft, the orbiter, began its two-year tour of the Jovian environment. It is making 11 orbits around the planet and many of its 16 moons, taking advantage of 10 close satellite encounters to conduct science investigations.
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In 1609, while still at Padua, Galileo built his first telescope. Turning it to the sky, he saw clear evidence that many of Aristotle's and Ptolemy's claims about the heavens were false. Galileo's first discovery was that, far from being perfectly smooth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought, the moon was mountainous and pitted, much like the earth. He made his most sensational discovery in 1610, when he discovered four moons circling Jupiter. He named these moons the "Medicean Planets," in the hope of winning the favor of the Medicis, the ruling family of Florence.
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The Galileo spacecraft and its Inertial Upper Stage booster rocket were deployed from the space shuttle Atlantis October 18, 1989. Shortly thereafter, the booster rocket fired and separated, sending Galileo on its six-year journey to the planet Jupiter. Upon its arrival at Jupiter in December 1995, Galileo will release a probe into the atmosphere so that scientists can survey the composition of the planet's clouds. The orbiter will relay probe information and will survey and photograph Jupiter and some of its major satellites. (Courtesy NASA/JPL)
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Launched on October 19, 1989, the Galileo spacecraft was designed for a study of Jupiter. Multiple delays in the launch of Galileo required the calculation of a much slower and more circuitous route to Jupiter. This path required gravity-assist or slingshot maneuvers around Venus, twice around Earth and encounters with two asteroids, Gaspra and Ida, on the way to Jupiter.
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