The Final Day on Galileo - Sunday, September 21, 2003
Posted by Garry Denke, Geophysicist on Sep 20, 2003 at 07:41
(12.237.89.80)The Final Day on Galileo - Sunday, September 21, 2003
The Wind-Up
Well, after twelve years of pre-launch development and planning, six years of interplanetary cruise, and nearly eight years in orbit, our exciting, quarter-century odyssey has finally come down to this: the final 19 hours of existence for the Galileo spacecraft. It began life in October 1977 as the Jupiter Orbiter Probe mission, was launched in October 1989, and arrived at Jupiter in December 1995. After circling the solar system's largest planet 35 times, it is about to plunge into the atmosphere of Jupiter, becoming only the second man-made object to do so, following the smaller Galileo atmospheric probe that accompanied the Orbiter to Jupiter. From launch to impact, the stalwart spacecraft has travelled 4,631,778,000 kilometers (2,878,053,500 miles) on 925 kilograms of propellant (246 gallons), not counting the fuel for the shuttle. In all that time, and across all those miles, Galileo has returned over 30 gigabytes of data, including 14,000 pictures.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=12593
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