Mercury,
November/December 2003 Table of Contents
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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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