Find and compare great local hotels with our search tool. Space History. Galileo was a trailblazer. The spacecraft flew into deep space and history, boasting many discoveries. Galileo discovered the first moon Dactyl to orbit an asteroid Ida. The spacecraft identified a magnetic field on Ganymede, the first known moon to possess one.
It would take another 12 years to get Galileo off the ground. There were continual government funding threats to the mission and even the existence of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , where it was being built. Debates also arose about Galileo's planned launch vehicle. Then, just as the probe was readying for a space shuttle mission, Challenger exploded and killed seven astronauts in , grounding the fleet for two years.
Named for astronomer Galileo Galilei , the spacecraft launched at last on Oct. To save on fuel, the probe whipped by Venus once and Earth twice to pick up speed, with the aim to reach Jupiter in Operating missions for the long duration can be a marathon for both humans and spacecraft alike.
As components on the spacecraft break down, it's up to the people on the ground to figure out how to resurrect them — or do without them. Galileo's most prominent failures were a high-gain antenna that failed to open — threatening the transmissions of data back to Earth — and a data tape recorder that temporarily jammed during the final approach to Jupiter. The sticky antenna, shaped somewhat like an umbrella, lay stowed on the spacecraft for nearly two years after launch.
NASA determined it might be risky to set it free when Galileo was closer to the sun during its gravity assist by Venus. On April 11, , controllers sent a command for Galileo to unfurl the antenna.
The motors ran for eight minutes at higher power levels than expected, which indicated there might be a problem. The spacecraft then failed to send a signal to Earth saying the antenna had opened. A fault analysis determined that some of the antenna's "ribs" got stuck. Managers did everything from rapidly spinning the spacecraft to exposing the antenna to sunlight, with no luck. To get around the problem, they came up with ways to compress data so that Galileo could send back more information to Earth, which helped save the crippled mission.
NASA now relied on Galileo's on-board data recorder and low-gain transmission antennas to bring information back to Earth. That worked well until the recorder jammed for 15 hours while rewinding on Oct. Fortunately, NASA found a work-around and was able to resume work a few weeks later. The tape recorder acted up in future years, though, necessitating more fixes. One of Galileo's first science targets was Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Jupiter's gravity had pulled the comet towards the planet and broken it up into more than 20 pieces. More about Eric De Jong Just because it isn't always easy doesn't mean you can't do it and do it well. More about Elizabeth "Zibi" Turtle. They require as much discipline as an athlete working to be a football player, or a musician attempting to land a recording contract. More about Claudia Alexander Charles Charlie F. Hall, managed of several of NASA's most daring and exciting early scientific space missions.
More about Charles Hall - More about Bruce Murray More about Ashwin Vasavada. I study volcanoes—how they erupt, and why—and what they tell us about the interior not only of the Earth, but other planets and satellites across the solar system. More about Art B. Galileo was the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. Balloon-powered Nanorover These tiny rovers could someday explore the nooks and crannies of our solar system. Scientists have discovered that the yellow color seen on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa is actually sodium chloride, a compound known on Earth as table salt.
Table Salt Compound Spotted on Europa. Europa's Ocean. The Planetary Science Division's missions have revolutionized our understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system. Fantastic Planetary Discoveries. Galileo sparked the birth of modern astronomy with his observations of the Moon, phases of Venus, moons around Jupiter, sunspots, and the news that seemingly countless individual stars make up the Milky Way Galaxy.
Europa, Jupiter's smallest moon, might not only sustain but foster life according to the research of a University of Arizona professor. San Andreas-like faults in the crust of Jupiter's icy moon Europa provide evidence that the crust, floating on a liquid water ocean, has slipped over the globe, so that the poles recently have wandered hundreds of miles, a University of Arizona undergraduate student reported today.
A recent image from NASA's Galileo spacecraft adds evidence to a theory that Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter's four large moons, may hold an underground ocean. Impact craters on Europa - the jovian satellite that scientists say may hide a subsurface liquid ocean - show that the moon's brittle ice shell crust is more than 3 to 4 kilometers 1. NASA's Galileo spacecraft has successfully completed a flyby of Jupiter's moon Callisto, closer than any of the spacecraft's 30 previous flybys of Jovian moons.
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