Galileo's Final Blaze of Glory

EccentricAnomaly writes: "CNN reports that the Galileo spacecraft is about to perform its last flyby of Io. Galileo will skim a mere 100 km above Io to enter a trajectory that crashes into Jupiter in 2003. This is to avoid the spacecraft running out of fuel and accidentally crashing into Europa which might contaminate it with any bacteria spores on Galileo. This is a real concern - Apollo 12 found bacteria on Surveyor 3 that survived two and a half years on the moon."

Comments

If we find life on Europa

[FreeUser]

...we want to be sure it is native to Europa, not imported from earth by accident in a previous space mission. This is simply good science, nothing else, and is completely orthogonal to how well, or how poorly, we are acting as stewards of the Earth.

So get off your high horse and get over yourself, saving the whales and turning our backs on technology (I notice you are using a computer, including all kinds of hydrocarbon-generated electricity and toxic materials used, and dumped, in the creation of its components) to "save the earth" really has nothing whatsoever to do with Galileo's final trajectory past Io.