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The first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter was the Galileo orbiter, which went into orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995. It orbited the planet for over seven years, making 35 orbits before it was destroyed during a controlled impact with Jupiter on September 21, 2003. [ 44 ]
It was referred to as "Jupiter I", or "The first satellite of Jupiter" until the mid-20th century. [14] With over 400 active volcanos, Io is the most geologically active object in the Solar System. [25] Its surface is dotted with more than 100 mountains, some of which are taller than Earth's Mount Everest. [26]
Galileo arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, after gravitational assist flybys of Venus and Earth, and became the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet. [ 4 ] The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for NASA .
A montage of Jupiter and its four largest moons (distance and sizes not to scale) There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of 5 February 2024. [1] [note 1] This number does not include a number of meter-sized moonlets thought to be shed from the inner moons, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized outer irregular moons that were only briefly captured by telescopes. [4]
Entering a Hohmann transfer orbit from Earth to Jupiter from low Earth orbit requires a delta-v of 6.3 km/s, [170] which is comparable to the 9.7 km/s delta-v needed to reach low Earth orbit. [171] Gravity assists through planetary flybys can be used to reduce the energy required to reach Jupiter.
Measurement of the speed of light from the time it takes Io to orbit Jupiter, using eclipses of Io by Jupiter's shadow to precisely measure its orbit. Io is the innermost of the four moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo in January 1610. Rømer and Cassini refer to it as the "first satellite of Jupiter".
The spacecraft's "first," and by far longest, orbit around Jupiter followed the JOI and lasted nearly seven months. On 27 June 1996, this initial orbit culminated in a close encounter with Ganymede, the largest of the four Galilean satellites. After the first Jupiter orbit of seven months, subsequent orbits were much shorter, ranging from one ...
Earth: Sputnik 1: First satellite in orbit. [5] USSR 4 October 1957 Earth: Sputnik 2: First animal in orbit, Laika, a dog. USSR 3 November 1957 Earth: Vanguard 1: Oldest satellite still in orbit, in addition to its upper launch stage. Expected to stay in orbit 240 years. Ceased transmission in May 1964. USA 17 March 1958 Earth: Pioneer 1