Missions in Space - Galileo

The Galileo mission was a NASA project to explore the gas-giant planet Jupiter and its many moons. The US mission arrived in December of 1995 and spent the next 8 years gathering large amounts of images and data on the Jovian system, which included the first measurements of the composition and structure of Jupiter's atmosphere using a special descent probe.

Artist's impression of Galileo passing Jupiter's volcanic satellite, Io

© NASA

In the end, Galileo plunged into Jupiter's crushing atmosphere on 21 Sep 2003. This was done so deliberately to prevent contamination of one of its own discoveries - a possible ocean beneath the icy crust of the moon Europa. The probe made many exciting discoveries about the Jovian moon's, such as the active volcanoes on Io and the cracked and icy surface of Ganymede - see below images.

Detailed Galileo images of the Jovian moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto

© NASA

The Galileo spacecraft was named in honour of the first modern astronomer, Galileo Galilei, who made the first recorded observations of the heavens using a telescope, back in 1610. It was his observations of Jupiter and its orbiting moons that provided the first evidence that Earth orbited around the Sun rather than the commonly held belief at the time that the Sun orbited around Earth.

In October 1991 the Galileo spacecraft flew by the asteroid Gaspra and obtained the world's first close-up asteroid images. In August 1993 it flew by a second asteroid, Ida, and discovered the first confirmed asteroid moon.

In July 1994 Galileo was in a position to obtain images of the far side of Jupiter when more than 20 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunged into the night-side atmosphere over a 6-day period.

For more information about this space probe click here