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Galileo was an American robotic space probe that studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as the asteroids Gaspra and Ida. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei , it consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe.
JPL built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for NASA, but West Germany's Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm supplied the propulsion module, and Ames managed the atmospheric probe, which was built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. At launch, the orbiter and probe together had a mass of 2,562 kg (5,648 lb) and stood 6.15 m (20.2 ft) tall.
Starting with Galileo's first orbit, the spacecraft's camera, the Solid-State Imager (SSI), began taking one or two images per orbit of Io while the moon was in Jupiter's shadow. This allowed Galileo to monitor high-temperature volcanic activity on Io by observing thermal emission sources across its surface. [68]
The Galileo project would have been considered a success even if the spacecraft had stayed operational only through the end of the primary mission on 7 December 1997, two years after Jupiter arrival. The orbiter was an extremely robust machine, however, with many backup systems.
Model of a Galileo satellite. This is a list of past and present satellites of the Galileo navigation system.The fully operational constellation will nominally consist of 30 satellites in Medium Earth Orbit, with 24 active and 6 spares equally divided into 3 orbital planes in a Walker 24/3/1 configuration.
To overcome this problem, a pioneering optical navigation campaign was implemented by the Galileo spacecraft team to reduce the uncertainty of Gaspra's position using images captured during the approach to Gaspra. This was successful and allowed the spacecraft to obtain images from as close as 5,300 km (3,300 mi).
In 1980s, astronomer Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to perform an experiment of detecting life and civilization on Earth using instruments of the Galileo spacecraft. It was launched in December 1990, and when it was 960 km (600 mi) from the planet's surface, Galileo turned its instruments to observe Earth.
This is a list of space probes that have left Earth orbit (or were launched with that intention but failed), organized by their planned destination. It includes planetary probes, solar probes, and probes to asteroids and comets, but excludes lunar missions, which are listed separately at List of lunar probes and List of Apollo missions.