What is the Galileo spacecraft?
The spacecraft Galileo , also known as the Galileo Orbiter, was a unmanned space probe sent to the studio of Jupiter and its months. Galileo is named after Galileo Galilei, an Italian astronomer and a Renaissance man who used one of the first telescopes to observe the months orbiting Jupiter. Galileo, NASA mission, was built by the Jet Propulsion laboratory. The Galileo was powered by two radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG), which powered the spacecraft through the radioactive decay of Plutonia-238.
Galileo was launched on October 18, 1989 as a useful burden on Space Shuttle Atlantis . Before launching in the direction of Jupiter, this brought several gravitational assists in Venus and Earth. In 1993 he discovered the first asteroid month, Dactyl, orbiting Asteroid Ida. Planetary scientists have previously suspected the existence of asteroid months, but never observed.
Galileo arrived in Jupiter 7 December 1995. The primary mission was a two -year Jupiter study, which was subsequently extended by six years. For most of the mission Galileo , Jupiter orbits in extended ellipses. At the end, it was close to the flying from the months of IO and Europa, passed to 180 km (112 miles) Io on 15 October 2001, the closest space ship came from the planetary body without landing. He watched the flow of lava on the IO from close.
observation made of Galileo led the scientist to a strong suspicion that there is an ocean with salt water under the European surface. However, to confirm this, the following missions would have to be sent.
Galileo sent the first probe to Jupiter's atmosphere. The Galilee's descending module module was 339 kg and was about the size of a small refrigerator with a diameter1.3 meters. Half of his matter was his heat shield. She sent data back about 58 minutes after entering Jupiter's atmosphere before it succumbed to immense pressure and was crushed as a can of beer, similar to Venera Lander, who visited the surface of Venus twenty years ago.
On September 21, 2003, after 14 years of service, Galileo was deorbitated at almost 50 kilometers per second to prevent contaminating the nearby months of Terran bacteria. It was the second space probe that has ever met its destruction in the depths of the gas giant, after the probe he sent in front of her.