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radical dreamer [soylentnews.org] writes:

In its weekly feature, This Week in History, the World Socialist Web Site, published by the ICFI and Socialist Equality Parties, reviewed the historic Galileo mission to Jupiter. This week in history: December 7-13 [wsws.org],

On December 7, 1995, the spacecraft Galileo reached Jupiter in a stable orbit around the giant planet, demonstrating the extraordinary capabilities of science and technology....

At a total 20-year cost of $1.3 billion--less than the Pentagon squandered on a single Trident nuclear submarine in 1995--the landmark mission revolutionized man's understanding of the giant gaseous planets... which [comprise] the bulk of the solar system outside the sun itself....

The initial conception of the Galileo mission was developed by NASA during the Ford administration, and many of the scientists and engineers devoted 20 years, virtually their entire careers, to the effort. More than 10,000 scientists were employed on Galileo and at critical moments were mobilized round-the-clock to solve problems which threatened the project. The 1986 Challenger disaster pushed back the launching of the spacecraft and forced a complete redesign of its flight path, since it was considered dangerous to carry out the original notion of lifting a Centaur rocket booster into orbit around the Earth that would have blasted Galileo directly towards Jupiter. A new path was designed, making use of the gravitational pull of other planets to sling the craft into its correct trajectory.

Galileo was launched in 1989. It spent a total of eight years in the Jovian system, mapping the complex of satellites, which includes the four "Galilean" moons, visible to the great Italian astronomer through his early telescope, and dozens of smaller ones. The mission was terminated on September 20, 2003, by sending Galileo into Jupiter's atmosphere at a very high speed to incinerate it and prevent potential contamination of other moons in the solar system by bacteria from Earth.

RocketSTEM takes us back to the man himself with This Week in History: Nov. 29 -- Dec. 5 [rocketstem.org],

NOVEMBER 30, 1609: The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observes the moon for the first time with his primitive telescope and sees that it is covered with craters. This was one of the first steps in the road to our understanding of the role that impacts have played in Earth’s, and the solar system’s, natural history, and this story is discussed more thoroughly in a previous "Special Topics [rocketstem.org]" presentation.

Space Coast Daily marked the Nov. 5 anniversary of the Galileo spacecraft's fly by of Amalthea in THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Galileo Spacecraft Flew Closer to Jupiter Than Ever Before in 2002 [spacecoastdaily.com],

In 2002, the Galileo spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter than ever before on November 5, passing by the small moon Amalthea and through Jupiter’s thin “gossamer” ring.

On this close approach, though, it sustained damage from Jupiter’s naturally strong radiation, and its instruments and tape recorder shut down.

After a month-long remote repair effort, engineers at JPL located the problem in the tape recorder and managed to repair it from millions of miles away, enabling data on the tape recorders to finally be transmitted to Earth!

More news about the Jovian system--

Spaceflight Now: Juno team planning close flybys of Jupiter’s moons [spaceflightnow.com]
Forbes: Life On Europa? Spacecraft Could Resolve Water-Spewing Debate At Jupiter Moon [forbes.com]
The Daily Galaxy: "Enigma"--The 120-Mile-High Plumes of Europa’s Global Ocean [dailygalaxy.com]

Original Submission