Spacecraft+Galileo+To+Jupiter+and+Its+Moons

=Spacecraft Galileo: To Jupiter and Its Moons=

**Jupiter and its moons are explored at close range.**
==== The Galileo spacecraft, an unmanned space craft launched by NASA, launched in 1989, reached the planet of Jupiter. Jupiter has been the target of NASA for some time because of its overly large size compared to all of the other planets scientists have seen at the time. Now that fact has changed, but in 1989, Jupiter was the largest planet in our view. The Galileo had to spin around Earth twice and Venus just to make the trip by 1995, a good 6 years, even with the boosts it got from flying around the planets. The Galileo was circling our Solar systems largest planet for a good 8 years, sending back data and discoveries to Earth, even with the occasional mechanical failure in the spacecraft. ====

What the Galileo had discovered on it's long journey, was that there is salt water below the surface of Jupiter's 3 moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, we also got a close look at the "pizza moon" as a volcano erupted, shooting straight out of atmosphere, lucky us. NASA was intrigued by the thought of a Jupiter mission, but the idea went through years of budgetary discussions and management changes, by 1977, NASA had come up with a sound reasoning plan for them to send a probe to the planet of Jupiter, they had the budgeting down and everything was sound, but a congressional appropriations subcommittee threw that idea out the window, yet it was taken back later after further investigation. 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 still in the process of being built at the time. The project was halted for another 2 years due to the tragic Challenger accident that took the live of 7 brave astronauts.

The Galileo, names after the famous astronomer, Galileo Galilei, had actually reached Jupiter on December 7th, 1995 and began it's great adventure of circling the planet, and it's 3 moons. At first the Galileo was doing small tasks such as surveying the faint rings around the planet, which were concluded at meteoroid dust up from the planet itself after said space rocks at flown at the planet. While Galileo is using known as the Jupiter observation, it is known for something much great, and it deals with the largest of Jupiter's 3 moons, Europa. It found evidence of a liquid ocean underneath Europa's surface, sparking questions about what sort of life could lie underneath. Also Galileo's data showed the moon's volcanic activity could be as much as 100 times more than what is seen on Earth. While all of this was going on, the Galileo also found the first magnetic field around a moon at Ganymede.

In 2003, after the ships gruesome battle with radiation and mechanical related problems, it finally ran out of fuel, the ship positioned itself away from all possible harmful areas and the moons, and broke up it Jupiter's atmosphere on September 21.


 * This is what many people suspect the craft looks like, from intel and various other sources directly linked to the project.**
 * There she is, Jupiter, the great gas giant in the sky.**

Howell, E. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.space.com/18632-galileo-spacecraft.html