Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
The Galilean moons are named after Galileo Galilei, who observed them in either December 1609 or January 1610, and recognized them as satellites of Jupiter in March 1610; [2] they remained the only known moons of Jupiter until the discovery of the fifth largest moon of Jupiter Amalthea in 1892. [3]
While multiple spacecraft have visited the Jovian moon since the 1960s, those previous two flybys were the closest any had gotten to Io's surface since the Galileo probe made numerous close flybys ...
Starting in 1995, the Galileo space probe orbited Jupiter for eight years, until 2003, and provided the most detailed examination of the Galilean moons to date. It included the "Galileo Europa Mission" and "Galileo Millennium Mission", with numerous close flybys of Europa. [146]
The Galileo spacecraft was the first to have entered orbit around Jupiter, arriving in 1995 and studying the planet until 2003. During this period Galileo gathered a large amount of information about the Jovian system, making close approaches to all of the four large Galilean moons and finding evidence for thin atmospheres on three of them, as ...
It's easy for Hubble to take pictures of Jupiter or its moons, but it only gets the chance to capture the planet on cam with three visible Galilean satellites once or twice a decade. That's what ...
The trip from Earth to Jupiter, the probe's exploration of the Jovian atmosphere, and an orbiter tour consisting of 11 orbits of Jupiter constituted Galileo ' s primary mission. On Jupiter Arrival Day (7 December 1995), the Galileo spacecraft was given a gravity-assist from Io and then subjected to the Jupiter orbit insertion (JOI) maneuver ...