25 Years Ago: Galileo Spacecraft Reaches Jupiter

radical dreamer 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,

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.

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